HIFF 58 Guest Judges
Join us for our guest judge panel discussion - open to all
April 25, 5 - 6:30pm
Art B 102 (Cal Poly Humboldt Campus)
Philip Thompson
New York
Philip Thompson is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, listed as one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2023, and a Sundance x Adobe Ignite and NYFF Artists Academy Fellow in 2024. His work investigates popular media’s influence on culture and the one-sided “looking” relationship between audiences and image subjects. His work has garnered accolades at festivals such as Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Athens International Film+Video Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, and NFFTY, also screening at Palm Springs ShortFest, New Orleans Film Festival, Lago Film Fest, Chicago Underground, and Indie Memphis, amongst others. He is also the co-founder and a programmer of the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival.
Victoria Vincent (VEWN)
Los Angeles
Victoria Vincent, known online as Vewn, is an American artist from Los Angeles, California. She has been making independent short films and posting them online for the past 10 years.
Victoria’s work often focuses on the disillusionment and anxiety of characters living distorted and unstable worlds. Her frantic and fast-paced art style seeks to visually capture our chaotic online culture and general feelings of doom. Despite the apocalyptic subject matter, she also hopes to make people laugh.
She has created over 20 short films which have screened at festivals worldwide, as well as been featured on Netflix, FXX, and Adult Swim. Her work is most celebrated on her YouTube channel, which has over 1 million subscribers and over 80 million views. She is currently working on a series of paintings and two new short films about the internet world.
Kaya Dillon
Arcata/New york
Kaya is a Director, Cinematographer and Producer based in Brooklyn, NY and Arcata, CA. A 2010 graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt, Kaya first discovered the storytelling power of camera traveling with the university's Tibet Field Studies Program. His debut feature film as cinematographer, “All Static and Noise” sheds light on the harrowing experience of the Uyghur diaspora. He is the series cinematographer for the newly released Hulu docu-series “Vow of Silence,” a detailed account of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. “Fox Chase Boy,” his directorial debut, strongly features an impulse for personal storytelling amplified through dynamic photography, multiple formats and cinematic layering. A driving force in Kaya’s approach to documentary work is its transformative power, for subject, storyteller and audience alike.