Sundance 2024 Jury Set With Debra Granik, Lena Waithe, Mira Nair and More

January 3, 2024 @ 8:00 AM

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival announced its jury on Wednesday which is set to include “Winter’s Bone” director Debra Granik, Adrian Tomine and Emmy award-winning producer Lena Waithe to handle the U.S. Dramatic Competition.

Shane Boris, “Crip Camp” co-director Nicole Newnham and documentarian Rudy Valdez will oversee the U.S. Documentary Competition. Heading up the World Cinema Dramatic Competition jury is “The Babadook” director Jennifer Kent, Mira Nair (director behind “Mississippi Masala”) and Rui Poças.

Mandy Chang, Monica Hellström, and Shaunak Sen will be handling the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Christina Oh, Danny Pudi, and “Scrapper” director Charlotte Regan will head up the Short Film Program Competition; and Zal Batmanglij, most recently behind FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” will handle the NEXT competition section.

“The Sundance Film Festival is known for discovering and platforming visionary emerging artists. We cannot do this without our jury, who so thoughtfully help us recognize and amplify the next generation of independent storytellers,” said Eugene Hernandez, Festival Director said in a statement. “We are thrilled to announce the talented, accomplished artists who comprise this year’s jury.”

“For our 40th Festival, the jury members this year are all artists who have had films at prior Festivals. They know what it is to introduce new work to the Sundance community and we are so pleased to be able to welcome them back to Sundance to take in the films our programming team has curated. We can’t wait to see what resonates with them,” said Kim Yutani, Director of Programming.

There is also the jury for the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which is deliberated ahead of the Festival and has already awarded its prize to Sam and Andy Zuchero’s “Love Me.” That jury includes film and science professionals and presents the award to an outstanding feature focused on science or technology as a theme, or that depicts a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. The jury includes Dr. Mandë Holford, Dr. Nia Imara, Matt Johnson, Theresa Park, and Courtney Stephens.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival takes place in Park City, Utah January 18-28. In a previous interview with TheWrap, Hernandez said this year’s line-up was selected from a record number of 17,435 submissions from 153 countries or territories, including 4,410 feature-length films.