Nancy DeLucia - Treasurer & Secretary

Nancy DeLucia is a retired arts administrator, business owner and economist. Most recently, she was the Director of Policy & Community Engagement at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and the Executive Director of the Hatboro-Horsham Educational Foundation. Previously, she worked for the Council on Wage & Price Stability during the Carter administration, the New Jersey Department of Health and co- owned a multi-use fitness club. DeLucia has served on the boards of the Monroe County Arts Council, Worthington Hall Foundation, Hedgerow Theatre, Be A Part of the Conversation and the Scatter Joy Center for the Arts. She volunteers for VOSH-PA and the James Michener Art Museum. DeLucia graduated from the University of Delaware and received an MA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.



Stephen Buerkle

Stephen Buerkle is an entrepreneurial technologist with a record of successes in the fields of immersive technologies (Virtual/Augmented Reality), computer software, digital content and Internet infrastructure technologies. Buerkle has founded, managed and grown multiple technology companies over the past 30+ years. He has also served in a senior capacity within two venture capital/investment banking firms, executing multiple early stage technology investments. In addition, Buerkle served as a Board member and Board President of the Federation of Neighborhood Centers, a capacity-building non- profit, serving communities in-need within Philadelphia. He has an BA in Cultural Anthropology and an MBA in Finance with concentrations in Investment Theory and Computer Science.



Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories. His other works include a book of nonfiction, The Book of My Lives; The Making of Zombie Wars, a novel; journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon has taught at Northwestern University and New York University and is currently part of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University.



Claire Elaine - Executive Director & Charter Member

Claire Elaine has been the Executive Director at PRINDIE: Princeton Independent Film Festival since 2018 after joining as a creative consultant in 2017. Since taking over the Executive position, she has helped to establish sponsorships and most importantly, gain the acceptance and support of key figures within the Priceton and filmmaking communities in addition to growing the volunteer staff. She is now grateful to be joined by the other members of PRINDIE's distinguished board to continue to drive the success of the festival.



Ryan McDonald - Programming Director & Charter Member

Ryan McDonald is a diversified professional with experience in entertainment, business, management and entrepreneurship, with a scholarly obsession of film and literature to boot. His sensibilities for quality filmmaking are essential to the festival - you can thank him for all the amazing movies you get to see!



Sara McDermott - Special Projects Director & Founder

Sara McDermott is an award-winning screenwriter and director who fulfilled a life-long dream when she founded Prindie in 2015. Her aim is to promote diversity in film, and part of PRINDIE's mission is to showcase female and minority filmmakers. She recently sold her feature-length screenplay Left to the production company Gaddis Visuals; the finished film is now available on Amazon Prime.



Dominique Carroll

Dominique is an experienced litigator and trial lawyer with experience representing clients in state and federal courts across multiple jurisdictions and a practice focused on intellectual property and complex commercial litigation. Dominique also serves as outside general counsel to privately held businesses and he provides strategic representation to small, medium and large businesses in the manufacturing, retail, media and other industries in a broad range of matters. A graduate of Rutgers University, Dominique went on to earn J.D. and MBA degrees in a joint business and law curriculum at the University of Illinois, receiving several awards for earning top marks and serving as an editor on the Illinois Business Law Journal. He resides in Princeton.



BOARD   OF   DIRECTORS

Emily Mann

Emily Mann, award winning Playwright and Director, is in her 30th and final season as Artistic Director and Resident Playwright at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey. Her nearly 50 McCarter directing credits include acclaimed productions by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Williams and the world premieres of Christopher Durang’s Turning Off the Morning News and Miss Witherspoon; Ken Ludwig’s Murder on the Orient Express; Rachel Bonds’ Five Mile Lake; Danai Gurira’s The Convert; Sarah Treem’s The How and the Why; and Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I. Broadway: A Streetcar Named Desire, Anna in the Tropics, Execution of Justice, Having Our Say. Her plays: Having Our Say, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth; Execution of Justice; Still Life; Annulla, An Autobiography; Greensboro (A Requiem); Meshugah; Mrs. Packard, and Hoodwinked (a Primer on Radical Islamism). Adaptations: Baby Doll, Scenes from a Marriage, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, A Seagull in the Hamptons, The House of Bernarda Alba, Antigone. Currently in development: The Pianist. Her new play Gloria: A Life about the legacy of Gloria Steinem will open McCarter’s season this year after a successful run in New York at The Daryl Roth Theater. Awards include: Peabody, Hull Warriner, NAACP, Obies, Guggenheim; Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle nominations; a Princeton University Honorary Doctorate of Arts, a Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwrights' Award, the Margo Jones Award given to a "citizen-of-the-theater who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the living theater everywhere”. During her 30 year tenure, Mann has committed to supporting the work of playwrights past, present, and future including: Ayad Akhtar, Edward Albee, David Auburn, Eleanor Burgess, Marina Carr, Nilo Cruz, Nathan Allan Davis, Lydia Diamond, Selina Fillinger, Athol Fugard, John Guare, Beth Henley, Naomi Iizuka, Arthur Kopit, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, Will Power, Heather Raffo, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Ntozake Shange, Regina Taylor, August Wilson, Doug Wright, and Mary Zimmerman. This year, she was awarded the TCG Visionary Leadership Award.



Liz Lempert

Liz Lempert is the Mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. She is the first mayor of the consolidated Princeton, following the merger of the former Princeton Borough and Township in 2012. She was re-elected in 2016, and is currently serving her second term. In recent years Princeton has been recognized for its leadership in governmental innovation, bicycle mobility, and environmental sustainability by organizations such as the New Jersey League of Municipalities, the League of American Bicyclists, and Sustainable Jersey. Princeton was named a Champion City in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2018 Mayors Challenge, and Princeton often tops national surveys of best small cities and towns for its quality of life and unique sense of place.
Liz worked as a journalist before turning to politics, including ten years as a producer and editor at the National Public Radio environmental program, Living On Earth. Liz began her local political career as co-chair of the Mercer for Obama campaign where she grew the organization from a dozen volunteers to over 3000 members. Liz received undergraduate degrees in History and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a Masters degree in Science Journalism from Boston University.



Jill Dolan

Jill Dolan is the Dean of the College and the Annan Professor in English and Professor of Theater at Princeton University. She is the author of many books, including The Feminist Spectator as Critic; Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre; The Feminist Spectator in Action; and a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein. Dolan received the 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship from the American Society for Theatre Research. In 2011, she received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism for her blog, The Feminist Spectator. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.



Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates grew up outside of Lockport, NY and started writing as a young teenager. She published her first book in 1962 and has since written almost 60 novels as well as many short stories, essays, plays and poems. Joyce is now one of the world's preeminent writers and has been recognized by well over 100 awards and nominations including winning The National Book Award for her novel them (1970), becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize six times and most recently, winning the 2019 Jerusalem Prize. Joyce is the recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Her national best sellers include We Were the Mulvaneys, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She continues to be a prolific writer and teaches creative writing at Princeton University where she is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita.



Erika Kiss

Erika Kiss is the Founding Director of the UCHV Film Forum. She regularly teaches the theory and history of art cinema in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in European Cultural Studies. She has studied history, literature and linguistics in Hungary (B.A., M.A.) and comparative literature at Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.). She was a member of the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is a co-founder of Germany's first private English-language liberal arts college, the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin, raised funds for it and served as its first CEO. As ECLA's first dean of academic affairs, she developed a year-long interdisciplinary curriculum in intellectual history and the liberal arts and supervised its implementation. Kiss’s agenda as a researcher (but also as a teacher) is to uncover art – especially the relatively new art of cinema – as a site of critical thinking in order to reform the Trivium of liberal education for the age of electronic communication. Such liberal education in the intersection of the civic and the aesthetic art of rhetorical deliberation is constitutive of deliberative democracies. Kiss’s latest publications are "Beyond Native and Alien: Nietzsche, Literally" in Philosophy & Rhetoric and "Between Mimesis and Technē: Cinematic Image as a Site for Critical Thinking" in The Journal of Aesthetic Education.



Susan Conlon

Susan Conlon has spent the last 20 years working as a librarian at the Princeton Public Library. She is the Head of Youth Services and her life-long love of books and films is an inspiration for many of the public programs she has created at the library. Susan is the Founding Director of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival and the Princeton Student Film Festival, which are held annually and sponsored by the library. These events and her day-to-day interaction with children, teenagers, adults and community partners provide Susan with the opportunity to listen and talk to people about the things they most love and value. She has a B.A. as well as a Masters in Library Science degree from Rutgers University.



ADVISORY   BOARD

Roland Nichols - Community Outreach Coordinator

Roland Nichols is a South Jersey native, who works in Sales and Marketing. His passion and knowledge in the film industry are assets to making PRINDIE a premiere festival in the area. Roland also has a background in Production and Fund Finding for Independent Films.



Colin McClusick - Sales & Marketing

Colin McClusick is a Business professional with a background in Marketing. His passion for film has driven him to help PRINDIE become one of the fastest growing film festivals in the world. He is excited to be working with PRINDIE's visionary team.



Tarik Tull - Liason & Content Stylist

Tarik Tull is a visual artist who hails from Philadelphia, PA & has a background in both fashion and film. Has hopes of not only changing the world through film but also helping make PRINDIE one of the leading film festivals in the world through his innate creative visions.



Monica Cookes - Event Coordinator/Executive Assistant

Monica Cookes received her degree at Antonelli Institute In Graphic design and later obtained her certificate in Wedding/Event Planning. Monica started with PRINDIE Film Festival as a volunteer in September 2019. She enjoyed her experiences with the festival so much, she inquired about becoming part of the staff and was later offered a position as the Event Coordinator Assistant under Claire Elaine - Executive Director. In her spare time, Monica can be found playing with her daughter Madison, volunteering at an event or writing and enjoying movies.



OPERATIONS   TEAM