Nace DeSanders

Nace DeSanders

Festival & Sponsorship Manager

Nace DeSanders is an accomplished experimental horror filmmaker, recognized for her multifaceted talents as a writer, director, and producer. She has garnered acclaim for her short films, including Infatuation, The Wounded and the Watcher, and Hello Sickness. Currently, she is immersed in development for her debut feature film project, Dance of the Demon. Originally from New York, USA, Nace embraces a semi-nomadic lifestyle, continually seeking fresh environments to fuel her artistic pursuits. Presently based in Madrid, Spain, she seamlessly blends her New York roots with the cultural vibrancy of her current surroundings, contributing to the global cinematic landscape. With a diverse background spanning production, operations, festivals, and distribution, Nace’s versatility in the film industry makes her a true chameleon in the field.

Our Team

Meet our Team

QWOCMAP is led by queer women of color, nonbinary, and transgender people of color filmmakers committed to building power, creating beauty, and practicing joy.

Kebo Drew

Kebo
Drew

Managing Director

T. Kebo Drew, CFRE directs capacity building, organizational development and strategic thinking, and is responsible for collaborations, engagement, and impact. She joined QWOCMAP as its second staff member in 2007 as a Horizons Foundation Rickey Williams Leader Fellow, when she developed and expanded the QWOCMAP Community Partner program. She also conceived QWOCMAP’s signature presentation “Reels of Resistance: Film IS Social Justice Activism.” She is responsible for building and expanding artistic collaborations and activist partnerships on local, national and international levels. She was a national 2012 Arts & Culture Fellow of the Rockwood Institute and a 2011 Next Generation Leaders of Color Fellow at CompassPoint. Drew has professionally managed development, operations and events for corporations, community, arts and nonprofit organizations for over 20 years, and is a coach for the Fundraising Brights Spots program. She is a filmmaker, writer and dancer, she is the writer, producer and director of Ain’t I A Woman? which has screened at the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival and Translations: the Seattle Transgender Film Festival, among many others around the world. She is a member of the QWOCMAP Productions Team responsible for story development. She has also produced numerous films, which include Don’t Fence Me In: Major Mary and the Karen Refugees from Burma, which won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary from the 2006 Washington D.C. Independent Film Festival and the Director’s Citation Award from the 2006 Black Maria Film Festival. She got her start in the 2001 QWOCMAP screenwriting workshop, where she wrote two feature-length screenplays. She has performed in the U.S., Latin America and Europe as a poet and dancer. She is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and won the Audre Lorde/Pat Parker Award and the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers Award. She also won the Irene Weed Dance Award and Robert Kuykendall Dance Scholarship. You can contact Kebo at events@qwocmap.org
Christina Lang

Christina
Lang

Senior Program Manager

Christina E. Lang is a biracial Chinese-American filmmaker and artist committed to serving and empowering queer and transgender people of color communities. She first joined QWOCMAP as a communications intern in 2017, and worked at the 13th and 14th Queer Women of Color Film Festivals. Christina is a 2021 Film Festival Leadership Lab Fellow through Full Spectrum Features and Film Festival Alliance. She holds a B.A. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Bates College, with a minor in African American Studies and concentrations in Queer Studies and Race, Ethnicity, and Identity. She completed an Honors Thesis about asexuality and aromanticism, and received the Twentieth-Anniversary Award in Gender and Sexuality Studies. You can contact Christina at programs@qwocmap.org
Madeleine Lim

Madeleine
Lim

Executive/Artistic Director

Madeleine Lim is an award-winning filmmaker with over 25 years of experience as a producer, director, cinematographer and editor. Her films have screened at sold-out theaters at international film festivals around the world, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, and Amsterdam Amnesty International Film Festival. Her work has been featured at universities and museums like the de Young, and Asian Art in San Francisco, and Crocker Art in Sacramento, and broadcast to millions on PBS. Lim’s films have received awards from the prestigious and highly competitive Paul Robeson Independent Media Fund, as well as the Frameline Film Completion Fund. She received the 1997 Award of Excellence from the San Jose Film & Video Commission’s Joey Awards and won the 1998 National Educational Media Network Bronze Apple Award. From 2000 to 2003, she was a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence. The Featured Filmmaker at the 2006 APAture Asian American Arts Festival, Lim has four times been awarded the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission for her films. She received grants from the Community Story Fund from Cal Humanities and the San Francisco Foundation Bay Area Documentary Fund for her film, The Worlds of Bernice Bing (2013), which won the Audience Award at the 2013 Queer Women of Color Film Festival. She holds a BA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, where she was awarded Outstanding Cinema Student of the Year. For 17 years, she was an Adjunct Professor in the Film/Media Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. At the age of 23, Lim escaped persecution by the Singaporean government for her organizing work as a young lesbian artist-activist. Ten years later, she created the award-winning documentary Sambal Belacan in San Francisco (1997), a film that is still banned in Singapore for its exploration of race, sexuality and nationality. As one of a small number of queer women of color filmmakers on the international film festival circuit in the late 1990s, she saw that only queer women of color would tell their own authentic stories. QWOCMAP is the result of her vision and she founded the organization in 2000 with the belief that a community of artist-activist filmmakers could change the face of filmmaking and the social justice movement. Under Lim’s leadership, QWOCMAP’s Filmmaker Training Program was awarded 2003 Best Video Program by San Francisco Community Media. In 2005, Lim received the LGBT Local Hero Award from KQED-TV in recognition of her leadership of QWOCMAP and her dedicated service to the queer women of color community. She was awarded the 2007 DreamSpeaker Award from Purple Moon Dance Project and the 2010 Phoenix Award from APIQWTC for her outstanding, sustained and pioneering contributions to the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women & Transgender Community. She received the 2011 Bayard Rustin Civil Rights Award from the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club for her leadership in advancing justice and equality for the LGBT community. She was honored with the 2013 State Farm Good Neighbor Award presented by Equality California for her extraordinary commitment to her work and the LGBT community. In 2015, she won the Queer LifeSpace Artist On The Ground award in recognition for her work contributing to positive mental health for LBTQ women of color. In 2021, Lim received the Lifetime Achievement in Community Building Award from the Chinese Culture Center in recognition of her deep impact and unwavering commitment to empowering future generations of storytellers and working toward a more just and equitable future for all. Throughout the past 20 years, her leadership has been recognized by members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the California State Senate and California State Assembly, and the SF Board of Supervisors.
Julia Nacario

Julia
Nacario

Engagement Coordinator

Julia Nacario (they/siya, she) is a Bay Area based Bisaya creative and filmmaker invested in serving underrepresented communities through a decolonized framework. Dedicated to gender expansive expression and community building, they were accepted as a fellow for QWOCMAP's Film and Freedom Academy in 2023 where they created their first short film, PAINTED ONES. They continue to work in film spaces across the Bay Area as a 1st Assistant Camera and queer artist. Julia was born and raised in San Francisco, CA and graduated from Wesleyan University where they received their BA in Cognitive Psychology and Film Studies. You can contact Julia at communications@qwocmap.org
Nace DeSanders

Nace
DeSanders

Festival & Sponsorship Manager

Nace DeSanders is an accomplished experimental horror filmmaker, recognized for her multifaceted talents as a writer, director, and producer. She has garnered acclaim for her short films, including Infatuation, The Wounded and the Watcher, and Hello Sickness. Currently, she is immersed in development for her debut feature film project, Dance of the Demon. Originally from New York, USA, Nace embraces a semi-nomadic lifestyle, continually seeking fresh environments to fuel her artistic pursuits. Presently based in Madrid, Spain, she seamlessly blends her New York roots with the cultural vibrancy of her current surroundings, contributing to the global cinematic landscape. With a diverse background spanning production, operations, festivals, and distribution, Nace's versatility in the film industry makes her a true chameleon in the field.