Emerging Audio Artists Panel

Live Events

| 60 MINUTES

Leon Neyfakh (Slow Burn, Fiasco) will moderate a panel featuring the creators behind the Tribeca Festival’s 2023 Audio Storytelling Official Selections in the Independent category. Short audio clips from these creators’ audio pieces will punctuate the conversation. The discussion will explore how each of these audio pieces came to be, obstacles faced by the creators, and what is next for this group of audio artists.

Panelists

David Modigliani

David Modigliani is a sandlot baseball player, documentary filmmaker and creative director with a unique knack for capturing the intimate human experience of politics. Variety writes that his work is "reminiscent of Albert Maysles' Primary or D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room" while The Hollywood Reporter calls his films "an inspiration for many viewers who have found it hard to believe there is any decency left in politics." Modigliaini's feature documentary Running with Beto takes us behind the scenes with then U.S. Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, his inner circle and the passionate first-time activists who support him in his against-all-odds race to unseat Ted Cruz. The film premiered at SXSW in 2019, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary before a critically-acclaimed release on HBO.

Cory Choy

Cory Choy is a director, an Emmy Award-winning sound mixer, producer, owner of Silver Sound in NYC, eternal optimist/believer in the human spirit, husband to Rachel, and father to Grace and Jakob. Esme, My Love is his feature length narrative directorial debut. Cory is currently developing and creating several narrative fiction podcasts, and he is also working on an animated feature length musical, The Champion, with, of all people, his mother.

Thomas Rowley

Thomas Rowley is a writer/director from Dublin, Ireland, who moved to New York in 2016. He studied Film and English at Trinity College, Dublin. He has written and directed a number of award winning short films. He was a prominent spoken word storyteller in Dublin, known for his unique and charming style. He directed the critically acclaimed online documentary project Storymap , which mapped the city through 130 films with local storytellers. He studied an MA in screenwriting in 2015. He is currently developing Pops, a surreal comedy feature film with a post-apocalyptic setting.

Leon Neyfakh

Leon Neyfakh is the host of Fiasco, co-creator of Slow Burn, and co-founder of Prologue Projects, an independent production company based in New York. Before starting Prologue, he was a reporter for Slate, The Boston Globe, and The New York Observer. He is the author of the book The Next Next Level.

Georgie Aldaco

Georgie Aldaco is a comedy writer/performer based in New York City. She has written for television shows including Inside Amy Schumer (for which she won a Writers Guild Award), Koala Man, and Miracle Workers: Dark Ages. Georgie has also worked as a staff writer for The Onion Video, and was part of the collective that produced Sketch Cram (a sketch show produced in a single day) at the UCB Theatre, where she wrote/performed/taught sketch for many years. Georgie is originally from El Paso, Texas and like most El Pasoans, is Mexican-American.

Mary Brophy

Mary Brophy is a radio producer, documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of IWR Media. Across both audio and television, she creates and produces characterful, award-winning stories, spanning art and culture, history, narrative nonfiction, environmental series and more. Critics have described her audio work as both “popular entertainment and nuanced” and “artful radio”. Her documentaries have been shortlisted and won IMRO/PPI awards (Irish National Radio Awards) and Mary was a 2018 recipient of a New York Festivals Award for Narration on her RTÉ lyric FM short series, Politics, Pleasure & Empire.

Ronald Young Jr.

Ronald Young Jr. is a critically acclaimed audio producer, host, and storyteller, based in Alexandria, VA. He is an avid pop-culture enthusiast and the host of the television and film review podcast Leaving the Theater. He is also a regular contributor to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour as a guest panelist. He has hosted shows such as Pushkin’s Solvable and HBO Docs Club, from Pineapple Street Studios. Selected as Vulture Magazine Podcaster to Watch, 2023 Ronald is currently developing new series’ both scripted and narrative that seek to unpack the human experience. His newest show Weight For It, launching in June 2023, looks to tell the vulnerable stories of folks who think about their weight constantly in a fatphobic world.

Rebecca Seidel

Rebecca Seidel is a podcast producer, sound designer, and audio engineer based in Queens. She’s currently a Lead Creative Producer at Goat Rodeo. Rebecca has also produced and engineered podcasts for Marvel, NBC, PRX, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gabriel Urbina

Gabriel Urbina is Costa Rican-American writer and director. He is best known as the creator and showrunner for the audio fiction cult classic Wolf 359, for which he won a multitude of writing awards. He also co-wrote and co-directed the comedy-thriller miniseries Time:Bombs, the apocalyptic anthology Zero Hours, and the urban fantasy series Unseen. Gabriel has also contributed to other podcasts - including The Bright Sessions, Wooden Overcoats, Our Fair City, The Phenomenon, and Life on Pause - and done work on fiction series for both Audible and Spotify. In his spare time, Gabriel DM's for multiple D&D campaigns.