a16z, Macro Tap 7 Filmmakers for AI Creator Fellowship
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Macro and a16z's Cultural Leadership Fund selected seven filmmakers — Bianca Lambert, Chazitear Martin, John Burr, Justice Whitaker, Nick Barili, Sulayman Tahir, and Tedra Wilson — for the inaugural Epigraph Creator Fellowship.
- Fellows will get direct access to frontier AI tools from collaborators OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Gamma, Promise Studios, Descript, Coactive, and Curious Refuge, with tailored instruction on integrating them across the creative process.
- The eight-week program culminates in a public showcase of original work at Macro's Summer House Creator Summit in Los Angeles this summer, giving the filmmakers' AI-assisted projects a public debut.
- The selected filmmakers' prior projects have been featured or recognized at Tribeca Film Festival, the American Black Film Festival, Slamdance, and Essence Film Festival, and have streamed on Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Netflix.
- Stacey Walker King, Macro's Chief Brand Officer, framed the program as putting technology in creators' hands: "Technology doesn't lead creativity. Creators do and now they have the tools to go even further."
- Judene Small Jean-Louis, Partner at a16z's Cultural Leadership Fund, said Epigraph is designed to break down the silo between creators and technologists by bringing them "into the same room."
Why it matters: Seven established indie filmmakers become the first public test case for embedding OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and other a16z-portfolio AI tools into professional storytelling workflows — with their finished work debuting at a public LA showcase this summer, raising the stakes for whether AI-assisted filmmaking can clear a credibility bar set by Tribeca and Slamdance alumni.
