Black Public Media Awards Filmmakers And Artists For Black Stories

Since 1979, Harlem’s Black Public Media has supported the development of award-winning creative content by Black storytellers worldwide to inspire equity and inclusivity. More recently, a select few won funding from BPM to develop the artistic projects they pitched at the 2025 PitchBLACK Forum & Awards. 

On May 1st, BPM selected a documentary about Alzheimer’s caregiving and two immersive media sci-fi projects for PitchBLACK’s top prizes. These projects won a total of $225,000 in production and development funding:

$150,000 Award Winner: Finding Your Laughter by Chicago comedian Arlieta Hall and director Brittany Alsot. This documentary follows Hall through as she tries to balance her lives as a caregiver to her father with Alzheimer’s father and her life as a stand-up comedian.

$50,000 Award Winner: Rhythmic Wave II: Ancestral Waves by Aya, a Nigerian-American new media artist from Los Angeles. Set in the year 5054, this 30-minute project is a live interactive performance that combines Afrofuturism, immersive dance, and AI-generated movement in a three-wall space.

$25,000 Award Winner: Run by Jeremy Kamal from Prince George County, Maryland. This project is a third-person sci-fi exploration game that, according to BPM, “fuses immersive media, music, and fiery landscapes to embark on your next adventure.”

In 2015, BPM launched the PitchBLACK program, which is the brainchild of Leslie Fields-Cruz, the organization’s current Executive Director. 

Having worked at BPM for roughly 20 years, Fields-Cruz knew it was her calling to empower artists, writers, and filmmakers trying to tell Black stories. She was inspired to create PitchBLACK after learning witnessing the work of Good Pitch, an organization that supports the development of social justice documentaries.

“[PitchBLACK]’s designed to bring attention to stories about the Black experience we think people should be aware of, and particularly, public media, but also potential funders and potential partners for impact campaigns or engagement campaigns,” said Fields-Cruz.

Fields-Cruz wishes she had enough money to fund all the projects presented at PitchBLACK. Since PBM can only choose a select few, PitchBLACK has a jury evaluate each contestant’s project and determine the winners based on multiple factors. This criteria covers aspects like story, production team, budget, and engagement campaigns. 

Overall, through PitchBLACK, BPM is looking for stories and projects that no one has ever seen before. In their opinion, no one has seen a project like Finding Your Laughter. Hall and Alsot still have trouble believing they won PitchBLACK 2025. 

The duo began working on Finding Your Laughter after Hall started sharing videos of herself and her father on social media. After seeing that people were engaging with these posts, Hall and Alsot saw this story’s potential as a documentary, and clearly, BPM saw it too.

“We’re still trying to believe we won,” said Hall. “It was unbelievable at first, but I knew we practiced so hard, and we really felt like our story needs to be told. So I felt like we really earned it… and we can actually finish the film.”

“The amazing thing about winning PitchBLACK is that it means we can finish the film this year,” added Alsot. “We’ve been working on it for six years, and so now we can pay our editor, Giorgia Harvey, to work over the summer to get us to a fine cut that we can submit to festivals this fall and finish it this year and hopefully premiere it next year.” 

Following this year’s PitchBLACK Awards, BPM has invested a total of $2 million in funding through the program since its launch in 2015. As BPM continues to support the development of Black stories, the nonprofit continues to bring greater representation for Black people in the arts and the media in a way that inspires audiences for the better.

“Being able to provide a variety of stories about the Black experience to as large an audience as possible is important to Black Public Media. It’s part of our mission…,” said Fields-Cruz. “When someone is able to see their experience or understand their experience from their perspective… it might give them courage or understanding or education around a particular subject matter or encourage them to change the situation they’re in. It’s about empowerment.”