About the team
Sandi Tan (Writer, Director, Producer) published a zine called The Exploding Cat at 16 and became the film critic at The Straits Times, Singapore’s largest newspaper at 22, then threw all that away to run off to film school at Columbia University. Her short films Moveable Feast and Gourmet Baby have played at over 100 film festivals including NYFF, Oberhausen and Clermont-Ferrand, and were broadcast internationally on RAI, SBS and ZDF/arte. She is also the author of The Black Isle, an epic novel that re-imagines Singapore’s past as a ghost story. She was a 2016 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow, a 2017 IFP Documentary Lab Fellow and a 2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow. She lives in Pasadena, Calif.
Jess Levin (Producer) is Sandi’s film school pal from Columbia University and has been following the Shirkers saga for a decade. After years as a veteran in independent film (producer of various indie features and post-production supervisor on Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York), Jess became a prolific producer on HBO shows (Cary Fukunaga’s True Detective and Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce, David Simon’s The Deuce (pilot), Treme and Show Me a Hero, and Steve McQueen’s pilot Codes of Conduct). Most recently, she is a producer on Scott Frank’s Godless and Cary Fukunaga’s Maniac for Netflix.
Maya Rudolph (Producer) is a writer, producer, and post-production supervisor based in Los Angeles and Beijing. Her experience in China has taken her through Beijing’s underground music scene as a co-founder of the culture platform Pangbianr and director of music videos and short films from the Beijing rock scene; to the realm of Chinese muppets as the former bilingual head writer and producer of Zhimajie, the Chinese co-production of Sesame Street. Maya has produced original films and series for American Girl, Disney/Lucasfilm, VICE Media, UNICEF, and more. And no, she’s not that Maya Rudolph, but she does love Prince.