2024 Speakers
Liz Cardenas
KEYNOTE & PANELIST
Liz Cardenas is an award-winning producer, writer, director and actor. Nominated for the Producer Award at the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards, she was a 2022 Indie Spirit Award Winner for Best First Feature for 7 DAYS (Tribeca 2021 | Cinedigm), which she produced for Duplass Brothers Productions. Written and directed by Roshan Sethi, the film stars Karan Soni and Geraldine Viswanathan. She was also nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2019 Indie Spirits for Augustine Frizzell's NEVER GOIN’ BACK (Sundance 2018 | A24) starring Maia Mitchell, Camila Morrone and Kyle Mooney, which she produced with Sailor Bear.
A former reporter for The Dallas Morning News, Liz was selected by The Gotham to participate in the 2023 Cannes Producers Network at the Marche du Film at the Festival de Cannes, was one of four producers to receive the inaugural 2022 Dear Producer Award + Grant and was included in the 2019 LATINXT, a curated list of emerging Latinx creators from an initiative by Zoe Saldana, Robert Rodriguez, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Other notable producing credits include Alex Lehmann's ACIDIMAN (Tribeca 2022 | Brainstorm Media) starring Academy Award nominated actor Thomas Haden Church and Dianna Agron; MATERNA (Utopia), which took home Best Cinematography and Best Actress awards at Tribeca 2020; JULES OF LIGHT & DARK (Wolfe Releasing), the 2019 Outfest Best US Narrative Feature winner; and David Lowery's A GHOST STORY (Sundance 2017 | A24) starring Academy Award Winner Casey Affleck and Nominee Rooney Mara.
A Rotterdam Lab Fellow (2018) and a Film Independent Fellow (2017 and 2019), she’s written and directed two award-winning short films and co-created a series of successful live-action children's films. Under her Ten to the Six Pictures, she has two features and one documentary in post-production and five features in various stages of development, including one she wrote (an Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition semi-finalist), one she’s set to direct, and one based off the Oscar-qualifying Indigenous short film she produced, BURROS, that Eva Longoria was an Executive Producer on. She also has a series in development about a Latino trans teen in Texas inspired by one of her short films, IMAGO.
Liz is based in LA and Dallas, where she grew up with her Hispanic father who immigrated to the US from Mexico City and Irish-American mother from the East Coast.
Missy Laney
PANELIST
Missy Laney is the Director of Development at Adult Swim. Laney previously worked at the
Sundance Institute growing their #ArtistServices Initiative, a program that focused on how
technology is changing the way audiences interact with films and at BitTorrent Inc.
Mariana Méndez
BREAKFAST WITH A FILMMAKER
Mariana Méndez is a film producer and awards publicist based in New York City.
She has produced several acclaimed short films including Oscar® and Annie nominated shorts in both the live action and animation spaces and, since 2017, has spearheaded Academy Award® campaigns for animated, documentary and live action short films under Joshua Jason Public Relations / JJPR.
Her most notable award campaigns include the ones for the Oscar® winning shorts Skin (2019) & The Neighbor's Window (2020), and the Oscar® nominated shorts Bestia (2022), Ala Kachuu - Take and Run (2022) and Le Pupille (2023). Throughout her time at JJPR, she has supported the execution of Academy Award® campaigns for entertainment companies such as Amazon Studios, Apple, Focus Features, GKIDS, Searchlight and Warner Bros.
Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, she holds a Bachelor's Degree in Film and TV Production from the New York Film Academy and is currently an MBA candidate at New York University's Stern School of Business. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America and sits on the board of the Jalisco Film Commission.
Jonathan Raymond
PANELIST
Jon Raymond is the author of the books The Half-Life (a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2004), Livability (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and winner of the Oregon Book Award, 2009), Rain Dragon (2012), Freebird (an Indie Next Great Reads selection, 2017), and Denial (a New York Time’s Book Review Editor’s Choice, 2022) . He also published a collection of art writing called The Community: Writings About Art In and Around Portland, 1997 - 2016.
He’s collaborated on six screenplays with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and Showing Up, numerous of which were based on his fiction, and on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce with Todd Haynes.
He was editor of Plazm Magazine, an Associate and Contributing Editor at Tin House Magazine, and served on the Board of Directors of Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House, Artforum, Bookforum, and many other places.
He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, the writer Emily Chenoweth, and their kids, Eliza and Josephine.