Jury

Andrea Krauss has been in the film industry for more than fifteen years. She has been with the Distributions and Acquisitions division of Here Media/Regent Entertainment for seven years, bringing her unique visual sensitivity, strong analytical skills, and cultural awareness to the company by screening and evaluating submissions for potential acquisition. She has also been instrumental in coordinating domestic and international film festivals for all of Here/Regent Films theatrical titles including the Academy Award® winning film Departures.

Andrea is currently producing on a new LGBT series called Fabulous High which focuses on the lives of several high school characters facing the realities of teenagers today. In previous years, Andrea served as Director of Operations and Theatrical Sales for Scanbox Danmark in the International Sales office based in Los Angeles. A native of Germany, she resides in North Hollywood, California with her two cats, Meetz Van Noten and Taffy Davenport.
 
Nathan Adioff made his feature film debut with Nate & Margaret (Co-Wrote/Produced/Directed). It sold for worldwide distribution prior to ever playing a film festival. Roger Ebert commended the film “A smart, observant movie about two very particular people, and its casting is pitch-perfect.” and the New York Times called it “Fragile and simple in the best possible way.” In 2012, the film won the “Best Narrative Feature” Jury Prize in Sidewalk Film Festival’s Birmingham SHOUT! and three awards in the FilmOut San Diego LGBT Film Festival, including a special “Outstanding Emerging Talent” Programming Award given to Adloff.

He acted in Joe Swanberg’s early films and web series, Young American Bodies for IFC and appeared in Frank V. Ross’s Audrey The Trainwreck, in addition to making a handful of award-winning short films of his own. He also co-created and directed a TV pilot, Bad Sides, which was a finalist in the Chicago Comedy TV Pilot Competition. His first leading role in the film, Blackmail Boys, won Best Narrative Feature and the Audience Choice Award in 2010’s Shout! Festival. His new short film Cock N’ Bull was selected to screen in this year’s Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival.

He and Justin D.M. Palmer co-wrote the script Backflip, a short about an overweight 12-year-old girl obsessed with gymnastics. It was awarded an Honorable Mention in the first Killer Films + Massify short film contest, in which Christine Vachon called it “An engaging and well-written piece with great potential”. They are currently co-writing two new scripts, one based on Adloff’s high school days when he was the only boy on the girls volleyball team in a small Illinois farming town.
 

Stephen Cone is a Chicago-based director, writer and actor. His last feature film, the award-winning, critically-acclaimed The Wise Kids, which the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips called “one ofthe best coming-of-age pictures in a long time”, has screened at more than 50 festivals worldwide, won 8 awards, including the Outfest Grand Jury Prizes for Outstanding US Feature and Outstanding Screenwriting, received rave reviews, including a New York Times Critics‘Pick, as well as raves in Variety and from Roger Ebert, appeared on four Best of 2011 lists (including the Chicago Tribune’s and Chicago Reader’s) and was recently acquired for DVD/VOD by Wolfe Video.

While dabbling in the Chicago theatre scene in the early 2000s, Stephen founded Cone Arts to facilitate the making of his own films. Since then, he has written, produced and directed the short films Church Story, Young Wives (2007 LA Shorts Fest) and 7 Experiments, as well as his medium-length feature debut The Christians (Gene Siskel Film Center; Philadelphia Independent Film Festival;NewFilmmakers @ Anthology Film Archives) and his first three full-length features In Memoriam (Gene Siskel Film Center, Big Muddy Film Festival), the aforementioned The Wise Kids, and his latest feature, Black Box, starring Josephine Decker and Austin Pendleton, currently in post-production.

As a playwright, his work has been seen in Austin and New York, and at Chicago Dramatists, Collaboraction and Bailiwick in Chicago. For the side project theatre company, Stephen has directed his own plays The Dancer, Henry Hettinger and Raised. He has twice been a Bay Area Playwrights Festival finalist and his short play The November Boy was a finalist for the Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon. His short plays I’ll Never Tell You, Young Wives and We Came Here Because It’s Beautiful have been featured in Collaboraction’s Sketchbooks 5, 6 and 7 (as well as the Sketchbook “greatest hits” revue Reverb), and his one-act Cut To : A Stream was commissioned by Collaboraction for The Siddhartha Project. Also for Collaboraction, he directed a workshop production of his own play Stonehenge.

Other theatre directing work includes the side project’s World Premiere of Philip Dawkins’ Perfect, the same theatre’s critically-acclaimed Chicago premiere of Sarah Kane’s Crave, as well as readings and productions for Bailiwick and Dog & Pony.

In the summer of 2011, prior to relocating to Los Angeles, Stephen made his Chicago stage acting debut in the World Premiere of Philip Dawkins’ The Homosexuals at About Face Theatre in Chicago, for which he was named one of the seven Hot New Faces of the Chicago Stage by the Chicago Tribune.