About
Genevieve Carmel is a writer, filmmaker, film programmer, and arts administrator from Cambridge, MA who spends much of her time thinking about how we might re-imagine and reshape artist support structures locally, nationally, and across borders.
Born in Boston to a polymath and poet from Chicago and to a multi-disciplinary artist and art movement organizer from Haiti, Gen was raised within a multiracial family who instilled in her an endless curiosity about the world and a deep appreciation for the liberatory possibilities of art, personal expression, and collective action.
Gen graduated with a B.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard College before earning a fellowship to move to Beijing, where she spent close to three years working as a Chinese-English translator and coordinator for independent film festivals and distribution initiatives like DOChina, Indie Workshop and NORDOX, and where she first gained experience in film programming.
After returning to Boston, Gen co-founded and co-programmed the international screening series Crows & Sparrows, she served on the selection committee for the inaugural editions of the Revolutions Per Minute Film Festival in Boston, and she served as a media arts panelist for the Boston Cultural Council and National Endowment for the Arts.
Gen now works as Program Director for the LEF Foundation, a family foundation that supports peer-reviewed grants, fellowships, and other resources for New England-based nonfiction filmmakers, with an interest in artistic risk-taking and experimentation. Before taking on her current role, Gen previously worked as Program Assistant and Program Officer and also served as Series Coordinator and shorts co-programmer for the DocYard, a documentary screening series that is a program of LEF.
Outside of her work at LEF, Gen is interested in pursuing a range of personal and collaborative projects across writing, filmmaking, curating, and music. She is also an active member of the AgX Film Collective, an artist-run film lab for Boston area filmmakers with an open membership that supports and celebrates the unique artistic possibilities of photochemical filmmaking.