Kathleen McInnis has over 30 years’ experience discovering, introducing and supporting emerging world cinema talent through her work in premiere film festival programming, film producing, and strategic publicity at A-List festivals around the world. As an International Programmer and Curator, Kathleen’s focus has long been on the Emerging World Cinema Filmmaker: shorts, first and second features (both narrative and documentary; animation and live action). In 2017, Kathleen created the New Works-in-Progress Forum at the Seattle International Film Festival, designed to bring together filmmaker, industry mentors and audience in a strikingly unique environment at a critical junction for the filmmaker-as-artist. The successful program creates a safe intersection, near the end of the creative journey and the beginning of the road-to-audience, for filmmakers to discover how their films engage on the global stage. Kathleen’s vast programming experience also speaks to deep, global relationships with filmmakers, film boards, producers, film schools, festival programmers and others in the global film industry. During COVID, she created a private FB group for filmmakers to help them navigate the quickly changing landscape: membership is currently about 900 filmmakers from around the globe. Her decade-long tenure at the Palm Springs International ShortFest & Short Film Market allowed for both discovery of, and support for, the hundreds of international filmmakers attending the fest each year. Tasked with creating the first international shorts program at Toronto Int’l Film Festival (TIFF), Kathleen built new platforms to bridge the distance between short filmmakers and industry decision makers. A chance encounter at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival would be the genesis for Kathleen’s philosophy, The Cinematic Trinity. She continues to strive towards making the perfect match between film artist and audience.
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