emilie upczak

An award-winning filmmaker, Emilie is an alumna of the Rotterdam Producers Lab (2014) and a recipient of support from the Andy Warhol Foundation (2019) and the Puffin Foundation (2021). She began her filmmaking career while living in Trinidad and Tobago for ten years, where she served as Creative Director of the trinidad+tobago film festival and spearheaded initiatives including the Caribbean Film Database and the Caribbean Film Mart. In 2017, she released her debut narrative feature, Moving Parts, which examines human smuggling and sex trafficking in Port of Spain and is distributed by Indiepix.

Emilie’s body of work spans narrative, experimental, and documentary feature and short films, as well as public video projections and digital exhibitions. Centering female-driven stories, Emilie prioritizes women’s representation both on screen and behind the camera. She works with both professional actors and non-actors and is committed to close collaboration with the communities represented in her films.

In 2023, Emilie was awarded the Digital Humanities Fellowship and the President’s Award from the University of Colorado, Boulder, to develop a digital exhibition based on the archive of Ann Roy, a feminist who worked to bridge the cultures of Mexico and the US. She collaborated with the University Museum to curate a show of selected items from the collection, entitled Patriarchosis.

Emilie recently completed Leo Sacer, with co-director Eric Coombs-Esmail, a social documentary exploring the complex interactions between residents of a small mountain community and a relocated mountain lion. 

She is also developing her second feature, Life Without End, an eco-western set in the near future on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Emilie released a proof of concept called Silt which premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston and won the Special Jury Award. It has since played at festivals such as Chicago Underground, Charlotte, Hawaii, Denver, Dallas, Santa Fe, and the Mother Tongue Film Festival at the Smithsonian. It was also awarded a Climate Resiliency & Storytelling award by FEMA and the Jury Prize at Borders/No Borders Film Festival in Houston.

Originally from Colorado, she now lives in Oklahoma and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma Norman. Emilie also sits on the board of Mimesis Film Festival and is a member of Film Fatales.