Artemis Fannin’s journey to becoming a Sundance Fellow

When Artemis Fannin was a little girl, she thought she wanted to be an actor.

She put in the work to be a well-rounded performer. She acted in school plays, she took ballet, she played in the orchestra. She held onto that idea of acting all the way through high school until college. It was there, at Georgia State University, where she realized maybe her dreams laid elsewhere.

“Somewhere in the process I just realized that I didn’t feel like I wanted my whole life to be dependent on my physicality – me, as an actor, “ Fannin said.

In high school, she had had a little bit of experience with film and television production, and it was a world that still interested her even if she wouldn’t find herself in front of the camera. Fannin started to actively pursue a career in the film industry, working in every department she could. Eventually, she realized she wanted to be a producer.

Decades and a lot of false starts later, Fannin is one of eight women who has been selected for the 2024 Sundance Women to Watch x Adobe Fellowship , a yearlong program designed to support and sustain the creative practice of women artists, with a focus on filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities.

According to a press release, each fellow will receive a $6,250 cash grant, workshops, referrals for career development opportunities, a yearlong complimentary membership to Adobe Creative Cloud, a virtual connection to the Sundance ELEVATE professional development track, and access to Sundance Collab, the Sundance Institute’s digital space for artists to learn from experts and build a global filmmaking community.

“I was very surprised and honored,” Fannin said about being chosen for the fellowship. She previously participated in Sundance’s Producers Intensive last year, and believes she was nominated internally, although she doesn’t know by who.

Fannin might have started in the film industry decades ago, but she’s come up against a series of obstacles on the road to now. In 2001 while living in Los Angeles, she produced a short film called “Kickin’ Chicken,” about a woman struggling with addiction. But it would be years before she worked on another movie. After she got married and had kids, television became her primary focus because of the relative stability it offered to film. She eventually ended up back in Atlanta and when the economy crashed, became a stay-at-home mom.

“This business is not that easy, and it’s not that straightforward,” Fannin said. “It really was many, many more years before I made another film.”

But the world of documentaries was calling. Fannin ended up reconnecting with a filmmaker friend who was about to start on a new film. The friend asked Fannin if she would come on board as a producer.

“I secretly was like, ‘I wish you would hire me!’”, Fannin said. “But I didn’t want to ask her, because I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable, you know?”

That project was called “Mama Bears,” a film by Daresha Kyi about mothers fighting for the rights of their LGBTQ+ children. From there, Fannin began delving more into documentary work and is currently working on two big projects: “Wilmington 1898,” a film about a coup carried out by white supremacists in North Carolina in 1898; and another documentary from filmmaker Skylar Economy that follows her own journey reckoning with her past and her experience with epilepsy.

When it comes to the Sundance fellowship, Fannin said she’s still thinking about how she would like to spend the next year, but one of her main focuses is to get as much help funding for Economy’s film as possible, as well as help with raising the profile of the film in the epilepsy community.

“Right now, I’m really looking forward to being able to turn my focus more to that film, and help [Skyler] tell this story in the best way possible,” Fannin said.

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