Elaisha Stokes (Canada)

Elaisha Stokes is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist and a 2018 fellow with the Sundance Institute’s New Voices Lab. Her work has been broadcast on National Geographic, The New York Times and Vice. In 2014, Elaisha was awarded the International Women’s Media Foundation Reporting Fellowship and the International Reporting Project Fellowship for her work in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her work has been supported by the Nation Institute for Investigative Reporting, the Patsy Preston Pulitzer Grant for Documentary Filmmaking, the New York Emmy Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council and the Columbia-DuPoint Awards. Elaisha holds a Masters in Documentary Filmmaking from Columbia University and is currently developing her first narrative film project, Kabibi.

Kabibi — A small-town girl from a war-torn town must navigate friendship, love and the high-stakes world of fashion to make it on the catwalk in the Democratic Republic of Congo.