Episode 78- Taylor Miller and Ronald Baez, Slamdance Miami

Film Florida Podcast Episode 78- The Slamdance Film Festival is a showcase for raw and innovative filmmaking that lives and bleeds by its mantra: By Filmmakers, For Filmmakers. Taylor Miller and Ronald Baez from Slamdance Miami talk about the festival, which will celebrate emerging filmmakers from Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Florida in an open-air festival experience at the North Beach Band Shell in Miami, October 28-30, 2021. The festival will then continue with a virtual component from October 31-November 7.

Taylor O. Miller is an award winning documentary photographer and filmmaker. She studied for her PhD in Communications at the European Graduate School in Sadas Fee Switzerland and is a co-founder and manager of Slamdance Unstoppable and Slamdance Miami. Miller spent 2.5 years as the Director of Photography with Harbor Heights Entertainment filming a docu-series on the city of Detroit. Her work on the series led to an invitation to speak at Google about THIS IS DETROIT which will be released in 2022. Her recent appearances include a panel on Authenticity and Accessibility in Film and Entertainment for NBC Universal as well as being a panelist alongside New York Times Bestseller Francesca Cavallo and Vanity Fair journalist and advocate Marina Coehllo for the Inclusivity in Film Panel at the Not Film Festival in Italy. 

Ronald Baez is an Afro-Latinx filmmaker and immersive media artist from Miami, FL. His short films have screened at film festivals and art museums worldwide including HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, the Florida Film Festival, Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, and the Norton Museum of Art. Several of Baez’s projects would go on to be broadcast for television by PBS Stations and distributed online by PBS VOD and Seed & Spark SVOD.

Baez's award-winning immersive media projects have opened in exhibition at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas (NAB Show). Baez was awarded the NAB Futures Innovator's Award in 2019 for his innovative XR work with South Florida immersive media collective Yellow Wood Immersive. Baez and his partners continue to work with local and national organizations and institutions like National Geographic, the New World Symphony, the University of Oregon, the Ford Foundation, and the Knight Foundation on a variety of ongoing immersive media and film projects.

In addition to his work as a filmmaker and immersive media artist, Baez is a founding member of the White Elephant Group, a Miami-based filmmaking collective, and also serves as the Artistic Director of the After School Film Institute, a nonprofit organization mentoring at risk, inner-city students in South Florida.