Lilly Wachowski’s Anarchists United Foundation Reveals Grant Recipients, Writers Discovery Fellows

Lilly Wachowski’s Anarchists United Foundation Reveals Grant Recipients, Writers Discovery Fellows

Lilly Wachowski’s Anarchists United Foundation is making moves on the grant and fellowship front.

The organization — co-founded by the Matrix co-filmmaker to address inequity in the entertainment industry across film and television — has revealed the recipients of three inaugural filmmaker grants totaling $60,000 as well as the fellows for its partnership in the Circle M+P x Anarchists United Writers Discovery Fellowship program. The founders of Anarchists United, Wachowski, Lawrence Mattis and Sarah Marie Flores, released a joint statement about the latest traction, offering that the team remains steadfast in the resolve to fight for their core values of “artistry, diversity and equity” as those morals are “currently under attack.”

The inaugural grant winners include Stanley Kalu with the Anarchists United visionary filmmaker grant, Jennifer Reeder with the J.J. Ingram Chicago visionary filmmaker grant, and Marco Bermudez with the Anarchists United feature film incubator grant. Kalu previously won the Launch’s Million Dollar Screenplay Competition for his work, The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and Outfest. Reeder, a festival veteran, has directed Night’s End, Perpetrator and Knives and Skin. Bermudez, a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s film program, wrote and directed the short Rey, which won a prize at the IndieFEST film awards.

Industry veterans Steven Canals, J.D. Dillard, Cheryl Dunye, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jon Watts served on the selection committee and handpicked winners. “These three artists are breaking free from traditional constraints and paving the way for others to do the same,” Howard said in a statement. “The remarkable work they are doing both in front of and behind the camera, for themselves and their communities, is invaluable.”

Back for a fifth installment, the Writers Discover Fellowship offers a space for six rising TV writers to hunker down courtesy of a six-month program designed to “nurture their creative talents and advance their careers in the industry.” It was launched in 2020 by Circle M+P, a firm formerly known as Circle of Confusion, and is now run by Anarchists United Foundation (with Isabella Garcia charged with managing day-to-day). The 2025 edition is sponsored by Kilter Films (Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan), Pageboy Productions (Elliot Page) and Paper Kite Productions (Amy Poehler).
 
The six Writers Discovery fellows are K. Broch, who writes, produces and co-hosts the podcast, She Said…Let’s! and writes and directs for the dating sketch comedy show, Single Riders Only; Quincy Cho, who works as a writers’ assistant on Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias and starred in the short Saverio; Jacy Duan, a graduate of Princeton University with degrees in sociology, theatre and Asian American Studies, who currently serves as the writers’ assistant on Tracker; Sydney Laws, a writer and researcher from Atlanta who studied at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and shepherded projects like Kindred (FX) and Wicked (Hulu); Amir Mo, an alum of NBC’s page program who specializes in “fish out of water commercial comedies”; and Sule Murray, a Chapman University graduate who now co-leads the school’s NextGen alumni mentorship program.