Team — Love in the Time of Migration

Erin Semine Kökdil

Co-Director, Co-Producer, Cinematographer

Erin Semine Kökdil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator interested in building solidarity and inciting social change through film. Her work explores love and resistance, and has sreened at IDFA, Hot Docs, Camden International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, among others. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, she worked extensively with non-profits and community-led initiatives in the U.S. and Guatemala. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Smith College and an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2019 SFFilm Film House Residency and a 2020 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Media Production at the University of Oklahoma.

Chelsea Abbas

Co-Director & Co-Producer

Dr. Chelsea Good Abbas is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Widener University. She received her PhD in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University in 2020 and holds an MA in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University as well as a BA in Anthropology and BS in International Area Studies from Drexel University. Her research focuses on border studies, migration, indigeneity, and the anthropology of conflict and violence in the Central American context. Within the United States, her work focuses on issues central to Latino communities and advocacy, such as Latino representation in mainstream media, immigrant rights, language, and education. She is a 2023-24 film scholar at Scribe Video Center and a 2024 recipient of Independence Public Media Foundation’s Local Filmmaker Fund.

Priscilla Gonzalez Sainz

Co-Producer

Priscilla Gonzalez Sainz is an award-winning Latinx filmmaker and educator based in Southern California. Her work explores personal narratives of transnational experiences, displacement, and identity, with the aim of uncovering barriers of perception through storytelling. She has been supported by Tribeca Film Institute, Catapult Film Fund, and NALIP, and has showcased her films internationally. Priscilla earned her MFA in Documentary from Stanford University and is an educator at Chapman University and UCLA Extension.

Sarah Garrahan

Editor

Sarah Garrahan is a documentary producer and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She is based in Los Angeles, CA. She co-produced and was an additional editor on the hybrid documentary The Infiltrators by Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera, (Sundance, 2019). She edited the Emmy-nominated feature documentary Building the American Dream by Chelsea Hernandez (SXSW, 2019) which was broadcast nationally on PBS. She edited the short documentary Status Pending by Priscilla González Sainz, which was supported by IF/Then Shorts and acquired by Al Jazeera. She edited the feature documentary Silent Beauty by Jasmin López (Hot Docs, 2022). She holds an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Flaherty Fellow (2013) and Felsman Fellow (2015).

Sue Ding

Animator

Sue Ding is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores race, gender, and diaspora through the lens of visual culture and place-based poetics. Her films include the short documentary The Claudia Kishi Club, which premiered at SXSW and was acquired by Netflix, and an Emmy Award-winning episode of the docuseries Artbound. Sue’s work has screened at IDFA, DOC NYC, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Miami Art Basel. In 2023, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

Aidan Salier

Music By

Aidan Salier is a Los Angeles based composer, guitarist and songwriter. Recently, he scored Showtime’s Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later, the follow-up to director Daniel Peddle’s seminal 2005 documentary The Aggressives. The film debuted on Showtime/Paramount+ in 2024 after its world premiere at Newfest 2023, and won Outstanding Documentary at the 35th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. His previous score work in film/TV includes music for Try Harder! (Sundance 2021); New Yorker Documentary Since You Arrived, My Heart Stopped Belonging To Me; and two seasons of IDA and Gotham Award-nominated series The F Word.