Festival Schedule

Official Selections

View

Stay Up To Date.

Our monsters need your email! Then you can be a know-it-all.

Cucalorus Board of Directors

Peter Sweyer, Chair

Peter is a Realtor/Broker at Century 21 Sweyer & Associates and owner of Wrightsville Manor. He has been immersed in the real estate industry since early childhood and has gained great insight into all aspects of the industry through the family business. He has seen the ups and downs of this market over the past 25 years and knows that over the long range Wilmington will continue to grow because of its desirable location along the Southeast coast. He is a Centurion Award Winner and has also been recognized as a quality service Pinnacle Producer by Century 21 corporate.

Natalie Lentz Blake, President

Natalie is an interior designer at Barbour Spangle Design in her hometown of High Point, NC. She first came to Wilmington back in 1996, when she attended UNCW as an Art History major. Natalie’s studies took her back to the middle of the state, but 10 years of design and a master’s degree later she came back to Wilmington in 2012. It was then she discovered Cucalorus, and jumped head first into the staff position of Box Office and then Programming. In 2017, she decided to hop from curating films to back over to curating spaces, but can still be found behind the curtains when the festival rolls around.

Jason Sargis, Secretary 

As a UNCW Film Studies Alumni, Jason began his career as an Operations Manager and programmer for the Cucalorus Film Festival. It was through the festival circuit he was able to meet, learn from, and network with fellow film industry professionals. Now a Location Manager and Scout living in Atlanta GA, Jason has worked on both independent and ‘studio- backed” projects. Jumping from commercials to features and scripted television, he enjoys the flexibility and creativity his job affords him. Jason has been lucky enough to be employed on productions for many of the major streaming and network broadcast companies. When he’s not scouring the land for the perfect filming location, or producing his own content, he enjoys hiking, traveling and attending any music event with his wife Jessica.

Jeff Sanchez, Treasurer

Jeff Sanchez is a musician and filmmaker, originally from New Jersey.  He and his wife Monika moved to Wilmington in 2005, and Jeff has been a volunteer at Cucalorus since 2006, in many different roles.  Two films that he worked on have been featured at the festival, in 2014 and 2016.  Jeff was the director at Centro Latino and ran a Mexican radio station here for 3 years.  He currently works for Freaker USA and has his NC real estate license.  He plays with local rock and roll band THE CLAMS.

Byron Hurt

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, anti-sexist activist, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, in the Documentary Film Program. He is also the lead technical assistant for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Forward Promise initiative, a storytelling project for boys and young men of color. Hurt is also an Emmy-nominated TV show host. His critically acclaimed documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and broadcast nationally on PBS’ Emmy-award winning series Independent Lens.

Kristen Brogdon

Kristen directs the Office of the Arts at UNC Wilmington.  She oversees UNCW’s Kenan Auditorium, curates the UNCW Presents series including Lumina Festival of the Arts, and coordinates programming in collaboration with five UNCW academic arts departments.  Prior to her time in Wilmington she spent almost eight years at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as Artistic Administrator and General Manager and nine years at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Kristen lives with her husband David and children Sophie and Nicholas in Wilmington, North Carolina. She knows that art and artists have the power to change the world.

Laura Brogdon-Primavera

Laura Brogdon-Primavera is the Manager of Programs and Operations at the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She served as the Administrative Assistant to the UNCW Chief of Staff in 2012 before moving to the CIE in 2013. Before that she lived and worked outside of Chicago, IL in environmental education and event planning with the Forest Preserve District of Will County.  Mrs. Primavera received a BSBA in Hospitality and Tourism Management from Appalachian State University and an M.Ed. in Higher Education at UNCW. Laura also serves as Activities Director at Holiday Inn Resort in Wrightsville Beach supervising a team of 12 college-aged students and organizing all the fun there is to be had while vacationing at our beaches. She has three kids and another on the way and a loving husband that allows her the freedom to create and support her community in all the ways she does. When she slows down and has free time, she enjoys disc golf and watching all the animated kids movies with her little ones.

Norwood Cheek

Norwood Cheek is a filmmaker and musician known for his music videos, the Flicker Film Festival, and his work with Super 8 film. He is in the band Cardinal Family Singers along with Peyton Reed. His music videos range from bands such as She & Him, the EELS, Superchunk, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Ben Folds Five, AFI, Toenut, 12 Stones, French Kicks, the Donnas, Soul Coughing and many others. He is the founder and creator of 10×10 – a music video documentary project. 10×10 has been featured at the Atlantic Film Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, and Cucalorus Festival.

Christopher Everett

Christopher Everett is a Durham, NC-based producer and director of the award-winning documentary film “Wilmington on Fire.” He is the founder and president of Speller Street Films and currently works with the Southern Documentary Fund as Program Manager. Christopher is currently filming his next two documentaries, “Wilmington on Fire: Chapter II” and “Grandmaster,” which looks at the legacy of martial arts pioneer Vic Moore.

Georg Koszulinski

Georg is a filmmaker whose work addresses issues of the Anthropocene, merging his interests in science, poetry, ecology, the ongoing effects of colonization around the world, and radical forms of non-fiction filmmaking. His award-winning films have been presented at hundreds of festivals, museums, and microcinemas worldwide, most recently at Experiments in Cinema, the Camden International Film Festival, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Museum of Vancouver, and the Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival. His recent documentaries, White Ravens: A Legacy of Resistance, and America is Waiting are distributed through Docurama and Fandor distributes his Florida Trilogyamong other films. Georg is also a professor of Film Studies at UNCW, where he encourages his students to develop their filmic voices and to make work that critically engages the themes, topics, and social justice issues that matter most to them.

Malaika Paquiot

Malaika Paquiot splits her times between her 2 loves: film and tech. To this end, she is a Digital Strategist with ARRAY, formerly known as African American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), founded by the director of the Oscar-nominated film SELMA: Ava DuVernay. Malaika’s led a group of 60 volunteers in the digital promotion of all but one of ARRAY’s acquisitions. Malaika is part of the Product Management team at a Wilmington, NC-based cloud banking startup focused on its international expansion. She has been in the software industry for 15 years during which time she has won the National Women of Color Technology Award. She merged the tech and film worlds by writing on online film distribution and crowdfunding and has done so for Focal Press’ Mastering Film blog, Filmmaker Magazine’s blog and her own blog Beyond the Box Office. Up since 2009, it focuses on innovative ways for filmmakers to distribute their films, including set-top boxes, streaming services and mobile apps. She is currently a member of the Sundance Institute, board member of Working Films and a former board member of the San Jose Multicultural Artists Guild.

Robert Redhead

Wilmington native and current Atlanta GA resident Robert Redhead works for software provider, Talend,  helping companies and Federal agencies achieve data-driven decision-making nirvana. When not mired in the world of high-tech, Robert finds himself in the operational gears of Cucalorus as an architect of screenings efficiencies. He is also lucky enough to call himself a documentary programmer for both our beloved festival, and the Atlanta Film Festival.

Kate Miller 

Bio coming soon!

Stefani Byrd

Stefani Byrd is an artist whose work confronts and undermines imbalanced power structures by turning the tables on traditional social relationships. Incorporating video, new media, and interactive technologies, her work addresses a range of issues such as digital feminism, gun violence, and barriers to empathy in a digitally networked society. Their work has been exhibited at places such as the CICA Museum (South Korea), Museum of Contemporary Art Alicante (Spain), SONIC MATTER Festival (Zurich), MOCA San Diego (San Diego), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn), and Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland). Byrd’s work is held in the permanent collections of MOCA Georgia and the Columbus Museum of American Art. She was trained in The Abramovic Method of Performance by Marina Abramovic and is also certified in Pauline Oliveros’s method of Deep Listening through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego and are currently Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Jen West

Jen is known for writing and directing award-winning short narrative films and popular music videos for southern bands like St. Paul and the Broken Bones. West also produced two films that were official selections of the 2016 Emerging Filmmaker Showcase in the American Pavilion as part of the Cannes Film Festival. She directed the Cucalorus Festival’s annual performance installation, Bus to Lumberton, in November of 2019 based on the screenplay for FALLING HOME (written by West and Virginia Newcomb). She’s been the recipient of the Sidewalk Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award, the Seed&Spark Best Short Film Award at the Flyway Film Festival, a Stowe Story Labs fellow, and a proud Cucalorus Artist Resident. West was a finalist for the 2020 Lynn Shelton “Of A Certain Age” grant, and quarterfinalist for the 2022 Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition and the Vail Screenplay Contest with FALLING HOME.