LEF is delighted to join the Film Study Center at Harvard University in announcing that Jessica Hankey has been selected as the 2025-26 recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship. Filmed on US cross-country trains, Hankey’s film in progress, SUNSET LIMITED, moves through changing American landscapes and social environments where strangers connect across cultural, economic, and technological divides–until their station is called. And where passengers collaborate in front of and behind the camera as boundaries erode inside the train.
Jessica Hankey is a Cambridge-based filmmaker whose projects use improvisation and performance with non-professional actors to consider how we interact with broader power structures. Being in relation with others, intimacy, and formal experimentation animate this work. Hankey attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. She has exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Vox Populi, and Bowdoin College. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Slamdance, and the Atlanta Film Festival, and have been reviewed in Artforum, Glasstire, and the Chart. She co-edited the anthology Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press 2023) and is the publisher of Orbis Editions, an artist-run small press.
The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $15,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.
