GRRL HAUS AWARDS 2026

GRRL HAUS AWARDS • 2026

For 2026, GRRL HAUS presents a year-long program featuring standout shorts from last year’s submissions, with all nominated films included throughout the season.

Across nine award categories, each featuring five nominated films, our guest jurors have selected their favorites from their respective genres. We are honored to have such a diverse and talented group of jurors and are excited to announce their selections.

Best Documentary short

Nominees for the Best Documentary Short

Saturn Risin9 - Tiare Ribeaux, Jody Stillwater
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

The Ozard - Ciska Meister
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Perverse Feminine - Kalen Aradia
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

The Birth of Naikee - Clementine Decremps
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Climate Control - Sarah Lasley
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Juror for Documentary: Colleen Thurston

Best Horror short

Nominees for the Best Horror Short

Mondegreen - Linda Mai Green
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Do You See Her? - Janet-Rose Nguyen
Screening: December 17 - Horror and Camp Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Beach-O - Leah Smith, Karen Lawler
Screening: September 24 - Surreal, DIY & Bizarre Shorts: 15 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Joshua Tree - Rachel Keaton
Screening: December 17 - Horror and Camp Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Rash - Lyssa Samuel
Screening: July 3–5 - Grrl Haus Screening at Lakeside Film Fest • Brandenburg, Germany

Juror for Horror: Eli Lewy

Best Comedy short

Nominees for the Best Comedy Short

Meet the Friends - C. Denise
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Scallywags - Nenda Neururer
Screening: July 3–5 - Grrl Haus Screening at Lakeside Film Fest • Brandenburg, Germany

Attack of the Coat - Lola-Rose Maxwell
Screening: July 3–5 - Grrl Haus Screening at Lakeside Film Fest • Brandenburg, Germany

Lacy's World: Mission New Crib - Lois Talullah
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Billo Rani - Angbeen Saleem
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Juror for Comedy: Jessica Vangel

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

Nominees for the Best Animated Short Short

Play Fight! - Katrina Cecilia Larner
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Fried! - Lizzie Watts
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

2nd Day & the End of the World - Sara Koppel
Screening: September 24 - Surreal, DIY & Bizarre Shorts: 15 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

35 Days - Heidi Kumao
Screening: September 17 - Experimental Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

ANADROMOUS - Ari Grubb
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Juror for Animation: Kate Jessop

BEST EXPERIMENTAL SHORT

Nominees for the Best Experimental Short

Los Tres Antifaces: The First Body - Angel Rojas
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Fumble - Mahsa Talebiani
Screening: September 17 - Experimental Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Luminous Matter - Bianca Arnold, Moss Berke
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Amaltaas – املتاس - Xoori K. Sarhadi
Screening: July 9 - Soft Magic: 12 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

trannies live forever: turn your eyes to the sky - Merit Thursday
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Juror for Experimental: Rhys Iliakis

BEST DRAMA SHORT

Nominees for the Best Drama Short

Blossoming Wasp - Nessa Norich
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Under the Whether - Putri Sarah Amelia
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Careful - Camille Lagaisse
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Before I Wake - Christine Flemming, Tinshine Mont
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Zaxme - Soore Vahe
Screening: July 9 - Soft Magic: 12 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Juror for Drama: Eimi Imanishi

Best New England Local Short

Nominees for the New England Local Short

The Shrinking Island - Ally Casa
Screening: September 17 - Experimental Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

The Watershed - Silvy Zhou
Screening: September 17 - Experimental Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Millie in Cis Hell - Kylie Mungenast
Screening: December 17 - Horror and Camp Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Interference - Lila Woodbridge
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Untitled Film Disinfection Project I - Lilan Yang
Screening: May 6 - Best of Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Juror for New England Local: Alex Kittle

BEST BERLIN LOCAL SHORT

Nominees for the Best Berlin Local Short

But What a Moment - Johanna Falke
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Mommy - Manon Praline, Evie Snax
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

My Grandmother Is a Skydiver - Polina Piddubna
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Field of Fog - Giulia Palombino
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

I Might Regret This - Aurélie van Oost
Screening: May 7 - Best of Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Juror for Berlin Local: Rosh Zeeba

BEST DIY SHORT

Nominees for the Best DIY Short

Roadkill - Ayla Mai Ahlquist
Screening: December 17 - Horror and Camp Shorts at THE BRATTLE • 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Letz Meet @ The Internet Cafe - Cyber Shanahoy
Screening: September 24 - Surreal, DIY & Bizarre Shorts: 15 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Be Here Now - Lauren R Melton, Chichi Castillo
Screening: September 24 - Surreal, DIY & Bizarre Shorts: 15 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

The Possession of Lottie Rose - Joshua Ballard, Robert Greene
Screening: July 3–5 - Grrl Haus Screening at Lakeside Film Fest • Brandenburg, Germany

The Shirt Off My Bony Back and Then Some - Abe Timm
Screening: September 24 - Surreal, DIY & Bizarre Shorts: 15 Shorts at IL KINO • Nansenstraße 22, Berlin

Juror for DIY Shorts : FL1X DIY Film Collective

GRRL HAUS 2026 Jurors

Juror for Documentary: Colleen Thurston

Colleen Thurston is a filmmaker, educator and film curator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has created film and video work for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, and museums, public television, and federal and tribal organizations. Grounding her filmmaking practice in place-based narratives and Indigenous world views, her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide.
Colleen has been supported by Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, the Ford Foundation, the Redford Center, and Creative Capital.
Colleen’s first feature documentary DROWNED LAND (2025) examines the cycle of displacement as it is related to resource extraction in her tribe, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Drowned Land is slated for PBS broadcast in 2026.

Juror for Animation: Kate Jessop

Kate Jessop is a multi award winning writer/director who has had hundreds of international exhibits and has a multitude of international distribution deals including Shorts International and Amazon Prime. She represented the UK in the Best of Women in Film and TV and was selected for the Berlinale Talent Lab both with her portfolio as a director and with her comedy series chosen for development in the Project Lab. She has worked across narrative film, comedy, illustration, live visuals, music video and motion design and has undertaken artist residencies in Berlin, Istanbul and Reykjavik. She has had retrospectives at the Gilbert Baker Film Festival USA and in Czech Republic’s Anifilm. Her work was written about in the first ever book on Queer Animation: On LGBTQ2S Animation published by Quickdraw in Canada, 2020.
She is also the director of the Brighton International Animation Festival.

Juror for Experimental: Rhys Iliakis

Rhys Iliakis (he/they) is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Seattle, USA. He is the cofounder of Seattle's Sea Slug Animation Festival, and also works as the designer for Seattle International Film Festival. His two favorite films are Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyazaki) and Raw (2016, Julia Ducournau). When he grows up, he would like to become either a beloved house cat or an orca whale.

Juror for Drama: Eimi Imanishi

Eimi Imanishi is an award-winning Japanese and American director and screenwriter. Her debut feature film Nomad Shadow (2025) world premiered at TIFF50 (Toronto Int’l Film Festival, 2025) and has been screened at numerous festivals worldwide. Imanishi is a Sundance Directing and Screenwriting Fellow, a Film Independent Directing Fellow, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow through the New York Foundation for the Arts in Video/Film. Imanishi’s award winning short films include Battalion To My Beat (2016) which received the Canal+ Award for Best International Short at Le Festival du Court Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand, and One-Up(2017) which won Best Narrative Short at Indie Memphis and was released as a Vimeo Staff Pick film and won Short Of The Week.

Juror for Berlin Local: Rosh Zeeba

Rosh Zeeba (they/them) is a Berlin-based Iranian artist working at the intersection of film, multimedia, and artistic research. Their work weaves together queer perspectives on Iranian mythology with themes of post-cyberfeminism and collective memory. Through "soft world-building" and glitch aesthetics, Zeeba creates hybrid spaces that disrupt traditional narratives of identity and representation. Their process-oriented practice invites viewers to question how images shape our sense of belonging in a digital and physical world.

Juror for Horror: Eli Lewy

Eli Lewy is the co-director and co-founder of the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival. She is based in Berlin and works as a translator and editor. She has curated the female friendship film series Birds of a Feather since 2020 and the idiocinecratic, a series dedicated to films that have rarely, if ever, screened in Berlin, since 2025. Eli has a film podcast called Somebody's Watching which features discussions with film scholars about dark & unusual subject matters and interviews with filmmakers and cinephiles. She is currently working on her feature-length documentary debut.
www.elilewy.com

Juror for Comedy: Jessica Vangel

Jessica Vangel (She/Her) is a Seattle-based projectionist, digital marketing professional, and cinematographer. She has worked as a projectionist at several local organizations and national film festivals for the last 8 years. She has since worked to connect the female / non-binary / trans projectionist community in projection booths across the world with her account @girlsinbooths

Juror for New England Local: Alex Kittle

Alex Kittle is an illustrator, zinemaker, and film projectionist based in Arlington MA. She is the tech director at the Brattle Theatre, the co-host of the Strictly Brohibited screening series, and a shorts programmer for Boston Underground Film Festival. She can usually be found emphatically yelling about unsung women in film, or watching a movie backwards from the Brattle’s rear projection booth. She loves horror, musicals, rom coms, surrealism, and neon lighting.

Juror for DIY Shorts : FL1X DIY Film Collective

FL1X is a DIY film collective dedicated to creating space for local indie filmmakers and creatives to collaborate and share their work. we help like-minded artists actualize, promote, and publish their art—offering a non-traditional path to visibility and legitimacy.
https://www.instagram.com/fl1x.us
https://fl1x.notion.site/

GRRL HAUS AWARDS • 2026

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GRRL HAUS 2026 Jurors