About the team

Carlen May-Mann (Director, Co-Writer) is a writer, director, and artist dedicated to personal and emotive storytelling. Her short film The Rat is an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and her feature length screenplay Strawberry Summer is slated to shoot in 2019. Strawberry Summer is being supported by the Department of Motion Pictures in addition to Cinereach, and was also recognized by Tribeca/AT&T Untold Stories (top 15 finalist), the Black List/Women in Film Feature Lab (semifinalist), and the BlueCat Screenplay Competition (semifinalist). Carlen’s body of work also includes several music videos, which have been featured in Impose Magazine and AdHoc, and her credits in the art department include A24’s Menashe and Washington Square Films’ 11:55. Carlen produces her filmmaking through NITE SHIFT, a film and media collective she co-founded.

Beck Kitsis (Producer, Co-Writer) is a writer, director, and producer focused on developing emotionally-charged social impact stories. She is currently co-writing and producing Strawberry Summer, which has received support from the Department of Motion Pictures as well as Cinereach. She is also developing Route One, a psychological thriller about an incel, which will mark her feature directorial debut. As a director and editor, Beck has worked across short film and music video content. Beck’s music video for her band SIGNAL premiered on NYLON in November 2018. She recently produced The Rat as well as the feature documentary Narrowsburg (dir. Martha Shane, post-production) and a short 16mm film based on the German mountain films of the 1920s and ’30s entitled The Inconceivable Mountain (dir. Daniel Witken, post-production). Beck produces her work through NITE SHIFT, a New York-based film and media collective, which she co-founded.

Alexandra Byer (Producer) is a Brooklyn based producer. Her producing credits include Tom Quinn’s Colewell, starring Karen Allen and Kevin J O’Connor; Matt Porterfield’s Sollers Point; and Tim Sutton’s Dark Night. Byer has participated in the both the Cannes Producer’s Workshop as well as the Berlinale Talents lab. She also co-produced Sutton’s Memphis and Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. Byer is the co-founder of the production company RATHAUS.

Chris McNabb (Editor) is a 2016 Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow and an Emmy Award-winning editor. Their past work includes Emmy Award-winning project {THE AND}, the accompanying short film {THE AND} Marcela & Rock, and the feature film Whose Streets?. They recently completed the short film The Rat directed by Carlen May-Mann, the feature documentary Narrowsburg directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martha Shane, and a documentary series Afrosexology directed by Dalychia Saah.

Strawberry Summer is a Cinereach grantee.

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