Film Team
Set Hernandez
Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Writer, Co-Editor
Set Hernandez is a filmmaker, poet, and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. As a queer, undocumented immigrant, their filmmaking uplifts and complicates the stories of their communities. Set’s feature debut “unseen” (POV/PBS, PRX, 2024) received the Truer than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirit Awards and was shortlisted as Best Feature for the IDA Documentary Awards. Set’s past documentary work includes the short “COVER/AGE” (2019) and impact producing for “Call Her Ganda” (Tribeca, 2018). An alumnus of the Disruptors Fellowship, Set is developing a TV comedy pilot which won the SeriesFest Pitch-A-Thon at the Bentonville Film Festival. Since 2010, Set has been organizing around migrant justice issues, from deportation defense to healthcare access. They co-founded the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. Set’s work has been supported by Firelight Media, Sundance Institute, NBCUniversal, Ford Foundation among others. In their past life, Set was a published linguistics researcher, focusing in the area of bilingualism. Above all, Set is the fruit of their family’s love and their community’s generosity.
Day Al-Mohamed
Producer
Day Al-Mohamed is an author, filmmaker, and disability policy strategist. Her policy work has focused on marginalized and disenfranchised groups and includes a variety of legislative and programmatic projects including active roles in passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act; and efforts at the United Nations to address reparations for victims of genocide. Day is author of two novels and is a regular host on Idobi Radio’s “Geek Girl Riot” with an audience of 80,000 listeners. Her documentary film, THE INVALID CORPS, a forgotten history about disabled Civil War soldier regiments, premiered on public television in 2020. She is the series creator, writer, and director of American Masters/PBS’ series RENEGADES. Day is a Founding Member of FWD-Doc (Documentary Filmmakers with Disabilities), active in Women in Film and Video (WIFV), and recently joined the board of Docs in Progress. A skilled moderator, she presents often on the representation of disability in media, most recently at the National Bar Association, SXSW, and AFI. However, she is most proud of being invited to teach a workshop on storytelling at the White House in February 2016.
Félix Endara
Producer
Félix Endara (he/him) is a creative professional based in New York. His films have screened at Berlinale, DOC NYC, SXSW, Mill Valley, and Tribeca. He chairs the Board of Working Films and is an alum of the Rockwood Leadership Institute. He has served on selection committees for BlackStar, Creative Capital, and Jerome Foundation.
Diane Quon
Executive Producer
Diane Quon is an Academy Award-nominated producer who worked as a marketing executive in LA at NBC and at Paramount Pictures before moving back to her hometown of Chicago. Diane has produced multiple documentaries: Oscar and Emmy nominated, Peabody and Sundance award-winning film, MINDING THE GAP (Hulu, POV) directed by Bing Liu; THE DILEMMA OF DESIRE with Peabody Award-winning director Maria Finitzo (Showtime); Emmy-nominated FINDING YINGYING by Jiayan “Jenny” Shi (MTVDocs); FOR THE LEFT HAND (PBS) directed by Gordon Quinn and Leslie Simmer; WUHAN WUHAN by Yung Chang (POV), SURF NATION (Mountainfilm Telluride 2022) and BAD AXE (IFCFilms). Upcoming documentaries include the UNTITLED SAM AND OMAR PROJECT and THE UNTITLED 19TH* NEWS FILM. Also in development is a fiction film based on a New York Times best-seller and Bing Liu’s first original screenplay. Diane is an AMPAS and PGA member, the recipient of the 2020 Cinereach Producer Award and is an IFP Cannes Producer Fellow, a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and a Film Independent Fellow.
dorian
Co-producer
dorian (she/they) is a Queer Mexican filmmaker, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist raised in the South. She is passionate about stories that celebrate the immigrant experience and explore social justice issues. Some of her most recent work includes writing, directing, and producing the short film Refugio (2023). In addition, her passion for sound has allowed her to work as a producer for Me Vacuno Porque… a three-episode, 15-minute visually illustrated podcast that explore powerful narratives surrounding health and community.
Daniel Chávez-Ontiveros
Editor, Writer
Daniel Chávez-Ontiveros is an award-winning Mexican filmmaker. He studied an MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford University. His thesis film EL CISNE (2016) was awarded the UNAFF Youth Vision Award and the Audience Award in the Program of Sexual Diversity at the Morelia International Film Festival FICM. He works as an editor in short and feature documentary films in the California Bay Area. He edited the HotDocs and Tribeca award-winning film ‘499’ (dir. Rodrigo Reyes) and For this film, Daniel was nominated for Best Editing in a Documentary Film at the Tribeca Film Festival. He’s also the editor of the ITVS funded film SANSON AND ME (dir. Rodrigo Reyes) and SANCTUARY RISING (dir. Theo Rigby & Florencia Krochink), films that are currently in the final stage of their postproduction processes. He’s also part of the production team in the limited series of GROWING UP IN AMERICA: LIFE AFTER THE TALIBAN, a project that was selected to participate in the 2021 Film Independent + CNN Original Docu-Series Intensive. Daniel is also co-director at Video Consortium México (VCMX), a non-profit organization that focuses on building community in the documentary scene in Mexico and promoting the work of emerging Mexican documentary filmmakers.
Claudia Ramirez
Associate Editor
Claudia Ramirez is a social justice advocate and filmmaker born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles. Claudia has worked as an assistant editor on the award-winning short “COVER/AGE” (2019) and Los Eternos Indocumentados (2019), a documentary feature film that explores the root causes of forced migration centering refugees’ stories, resilience, and grassroot transnational organizing actions. Claudia has taken her talent in post production and worked on shows on HBO and Disney Plus. She is also a co-founder of the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. Outside of filmmaking, she has been a social justice advocate working at the intersection of community movement building, migrant justice, and healing work since 2010. Claudia is a recipient of the Elevate Incubator Screenwriting Lab and currently working on developing a screenplay and a short documentary. When she is not in an editing room Claudia likes to go on bike rides, watch comedy specials, tend to her plants, and dance cumbias.
DeAndre James Allen-Toole
Composer
DeAndre James Allen-Toole is a composer for film, television, games, and new media best known for his original score to Julian Higgins' neo-Western feature God's Country--starring Thandiwe Newton. First showing as a 2022 Sundance Film Festival Premieres selection, God's Country has received widespread critical acclaim for many aspects, notably including DeAndre's score. The film opened in U.S. theaters on September 16th, 2022. Since graduating from Columbia College Chicago's Music Composition for the Screen program in 2017, DeAndre enjoyed a lively career crafting music for diverse media independently and under the employment of many senior composers in Los Angeles before launching an independent career. He is a Sundance Institute Film Music & Sound Design Lab alum, a Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program grantee, and most recently, a Reel Change Film Fund grantee in connection to his first feature-length film, God's Country.
Conchita Hernandez Legorreta
Senior Impact Strategist
Conchita Hernandez Legorreta was born in Mexico and grew up in California. She advocates for the rights of blind children and their parents in the public-school setting in the United States and abroad. Conchita received a Doctoral degree in Special Education from George Washington University. Conchita is a Biden Presidential Appointee to the National Board for Education Sciences. Conchita is the founder and Chair of METAS a non-profit organization that trains educators in Latin America that work with blind/low vision students and other disabilities. In this role she engages lawmakers in policy discussions around people with disabilities and inclusion. Conchita is also a co-founder of the National Coalition of Latinx with Disabilities that seeks to amplify the voices of disabled Latinx in the disability rights movement. Conchita strives to be a voice for change for educators, professionals and advocates to make full inclusion a reality for people with disabilities in Latin America.
Julie Yeeun Kim
Songwriter
Julie Yeeun Kim is a Korean American singer/songwriter, writer, and educator. Many of her musical and literary projects engage themes of identity, memory, and home. Currently, she is a Fellow at the Collegeville Institute’s “Emerging Writers Program.” In 2019, she was an Art Fellow through Define American’s fellowship for undocumented creatives as well as a regular voice actor for “Little Tooni,” a Korean children’s Youtube show.
In 2018, Julie collaborated with John Daversa’s Big Band in the album “American Dreamers,” which won three Grammys in 2019, including the category for “Best Large Jazz Ensemble.” She teaches in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. She and her husband live in Bergen County, New Jersey but she is forever an Angeleno.
Qudsiya Naqui
Impact Producer Emeritus
Qudsiya Naqui is a lawyer and disability media-maker based in Washington, DC. She currently serves as Assistant Professor at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. She is also the creator and host of Down to the Struts, a podcast about disability, design, and intersectionality. Qudsiya is committed to leveraging media and the law to fight for transformative change that will ultimately abolish systems of incarceration and economic oppression. She was selected as a 2025-2026 USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow. Her work has been featured in the UCLA Law Review, Forbes Magazine, Vox, the Disability Visibility Project, and Oxford University Press. When she’s not working on her podcast, Qudsiya enjoys building disability community through adaptive sports.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer
Impact Manager
Ana (she/her) is a queer poet, translator, and impact practitioner from Puerto Rico. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. She's worked on the impact campaigns for LANDFALL (Cecilia Aldarondo, 2020) and UNSEEN (Set Hernandez, 2023). To Love an Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Que tiemble, a derivative work in Spanish, was published with La Impresora in 2023. Aimer Une Île, a French translation of Que tiemble by Benjamin Haroun Montesano, was published with Editorial Pulpo in 2025. Ana is a 2024 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence Program Alumna, she was awarded a 2023 MASS MoCA Fellowship for Artists from Puerto Rico, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. She’s the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants.