Chicken & Egg Films announced today via Documentary magazine $450,000 in grants to six recipients of its 2026 Chicken & Egg Award. Each cohort member will receive a $75,000 grant: a $50,000 unrestricted career grant and $25,000 to be applied to a project the filmmaker will work on during their breakthrough award year. The Award recipients are Amber Fares, Chase Joynt, Zippy Kimundu, Tamara Kotevska, Jules Rosskam, and Ema Ryan Yamazaki.

The Chicken & Egg Award was created in 2016 to recognize advance-stage women and gender-expansive nonfiction filmmakers who are poised to reach new heights in their careers. It also acknowledges the structural barriers these accomplished industry veterans face that prevent them from pursuing a full-time career as independent storytellers. Each Awardee receives a $75,000 grant and year-long tailored mentorship, attends a creative retreat, participates in monthly peer-to-peer cohort calls, and travels to a major film festival where Chicken & Egg Films hosts a culminating retreat and facilitates high-level industry networking opportunities around distribution, funding, and more.  

 “The Chicken & Egg Award was created to meet the complex challenges that advanced career filmmakers face by offering flexible funding and individualized support,” said Chicken & Egg Films Program Director Kiyoko McCrae. “It is incredibly gratifying to support filmmakers across a wide range of journeys and creative paths as exemplified in this year’s cohort. There is no single trajectory to meaningful, impactful work, and each journey is deeply personal. This year’s cohort reflects a remarkable diversity of aesthetics, approaches, and storytelling practices, and we are honored to accompany each of these artists as they continue to evolve, take risks, and redefine what the field of documentary can be.”

“A fundamental aspect of our mission is to provide filmmakers with unrestricted funding so they can build sustainable careers. This approach to artist support is perhaps more important than ever as access to public and private funding declines globally,” said Elaisha Stokes, Associate Director of Program. “This year’s cohort brings together an outstanding group of international artists working at the highest level of the documentary craft, each with a strong record of creative and professional achievement. We are thrilled to celebrate their past achievements and nurture their next chapter.”

This cohort comprises a group of artists whose practices are as deeply rooted in their communities as they are expansive in their ambitions. Working across documentary, fiction, and hybrid forms, the 2026 Awardees are interrogating systems of power, excavating historical narratives, and forging new cinematic languages. They share a few key things in common: they are each at a pivotal moment in their career–poised for an artistic and/or professional breakthrough–and they have each already received support from Chicken & Egg Films for previous projects.

Jules Rosskam (Desire Lines, Paternal Rites) is a vital voice in queer cinema whose work bridges documentary and fine art, crafting intimate, formally innovative explorations of embodiment, ethics, and the relationship between form and politics. Tamara Kotevska (The Tale of Silyan, Honeyland), who hails from North Macedonia, continues to build a prolific body of work examining the relationship between people and their environments, all while investing in the future of filmmaking in her home country. Zippy Kimundu (Widow Champion, Our Land, Our Freedom) is a powerful field-builder and artist who founded a film festival and filmmaking residency space in Kenya and whose work tackles complex global systems with a people-first perspective. 

Amber Fares (Coexistence, My Ass!, Speed Sisters) brings significant experience navigating politically charged storytelling across borders and innovating new paths to successful distribution. Ema Ryan Yamazaki (The Making of a Japanese, editor of Black Box Diaries) enters her award year following extraordinary 2025 Oscar recognition and is working to expand her creative repertoire to include archival filmmaking in addition to verite. Chase Joynt (State of Firsts, Framing Agnes) continues to push documentary hybrid form into new territory, mixing archival material, performance, and investigative storytelling to question how histories are constructed and who gets to tell them. 

Additional information about the Chicken & Egg Award recipients: 

Amber Fares (CANADA) Amber Fares (she/her) is an award-winning documentary director, producer, and cinematographer from Canada. Her films include Coexistence, My Ass! (2025), which won a Special Jury Award at Sundance and was shortlisted for an Academy Award, and We Are Ayenda (WhatsApp 2021), which won the Cannes Lion Grand Prix. As a producer and cinematographer, her credits include the Oscar-nominated short The Devil is Busy (HBO 2026), and the Peabody Award winner The Judge (2017). She was cinematographer on the Sundance Special Jury Award winner and Emmy-nominated Life After (PBS 2025). A Sundance Momentum Fellow, Chicken & Egg Awardee, and Pillars Artist Fellow, she is based between New York and Canada. 

Chase Joynt (CANADA) Chase Joynt (he/him) is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer who works at the edges of genre. His award-winning feature documentaries have premiered at Sundance, TIFF, and Tribeca, including Framing Agnes, which won both the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance 2022. His work has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and by Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” With Samantha Curley, Chase runs the Oscar short-listed and Emmy-nominated production company Level Ground Productions.

Zippy Kimundu (KENYA) Zippy Kimundu (she/her) is an award-winning Kenyan filmmaker with nearly two decades of global experience spanning more than 20 countries. She co-directed A Fork, a Spoon & a Knight with Mira Nair and was assistant editor on Disney’s Queen of Katwe. Her feature documentaries include Our Land, Our Freedom (IDFA/Sheffield) and Widow Champion (Hot Docs/Tribeca). She holds an MFA from NYU and is the founder of Afrofilms International, a collective driving socio-political consciousness and action. 

Tamara Kotevska (NORTH MACEDONIA) Tamara Kotevska’s (she/her) feature documentary Honeyland swept three major Sundance awards and was the first-ever documentary to be nominated for both Best Documentary and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. Her latest feature, The Tale of Silyan, was a National Geographic selection, a Venice Muse Award winner, and winner of the Best Documentary and Best Cinematography awards at IDA, along with twenty other global accolades. She is a Chicken & Egg Awardee and her current film is supported by Sundance Sandbox.

Jules Rosskam (US) Jules Rosskam (he/him) is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. He is a 2026 USA Artist Fellow, a 2026 Chicken & Egg Awardee, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. His most recent film, Desire Lines, premiered at Sundance—where it won the NEXT Special Jury Award—in 2024. His work has screened around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the British Film Institute, Anthology Film Archives, Sundance, Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Provincetown International Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and dozens of LGBTQ film festivals worldwide.

Ema Ryan Yamazaki (JAPAN/UK) Ema Ryan Yamazaki (she/her) is the Director of Instruments of a Beating Heart and editor of Black Box Diaries, which were both nominated for the Academy Awards in 2025. She has directed three acclaimed feature documentaries: The Making of a Japanese (2023), Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019), and Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators (2017).