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2023 Short Film Competition Judges

A smling, bearded man sits in a powerchair, resting one hand on an attached clear tray, He is on a paved path, running through a grassy field with a stream.

Eric Clow (above, on a birding excursion) is a writer and birder with Becker’s muscular dystrophy. He works at Art Spark Texas and has been published in the Rio Review and Aural Literature. The webcomic “Faceplant,” his collaboration with artist David Borden, won the Comics category of the Pen 2 Paper Creative Writing Contest in 2018. He served as a judge for the Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival from 2013-2017 and is excited to return! Eric lives in Austin with his wife and two corgis. Follow his birding chronicles and other writing projects on Instagram @realbirdcitynews or on Facebook @birdcitynews.

A man with curly brown hair and a denim shirt smiles broadly at the camera. A fence and trees are blurred out in the background.

Samuel Garcia is the current Film Programming Coordinator at Austin Film Festival, the historic and internationally known screenwriter’s festival based in Austin. Samuel is tasked with connecting and engaging diverse communities to better help champion the voices of underrepresented storytellers while also helping assist AFF’s yearly programming needs. His time at the University of Texas was spent studying creative writing, rhetoric, and film. By participating with UT’s nationally ranked speech team, Texas Speech, Samuel worked to address issues and narratives in the disabled community, by both providing a platform for other’s experiences and highlighting his own. Samuel currently lives in Austin helping prepare this year’s AFF while also working on several writing projects.

Close up of a bearded man in a black t-shirt, speaking to somone off camera and geaturing with one hand.

Craig Mooneyham (above, directing his latest short film, Seeing the Unseen) is a husband of twenty-eight years, father of three adult children, works as a project manager for a company that develops IT solutions for the public sector, and has a passion for philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and filmmaking. Craig has been writing, producing, and directing films since 2009 and had the fortune of screening his film Salting the Fly at the 2020 Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival and winning the non-documentary division of the short film competition. Follow Salting the Fly on Instagram @salting_the_fly_film and Craig’s production company, Lunar Pig Productions, on Instagram @lunarpigproductions.

A woman with curly brown hair and a black shirt smiles up at the camera, leaning forward on her desk

Judith Vecchione is Senior Editorial Advisor to WORLD Channel, a 24-7 digital multicast public media platform that presents unique nonfiction programming from established and emerging filmmakers. For most of her long career Vecchione has been a producer, director, writer, and executive producer on major PBS documentary series. She was series senior producer for the award-winning Eyes on the Prize, and executive produced many national PBS specials. Her most recent projects were Blood Sugar Rising, exploring today’s devastating diabetes epidemic; and American Veteran, presenting the experiences of military veterans today and across our history in a television series, a podcast, and a YouTube series. Awards include a national Emmy, Peabody Award, Davey Award, CINE Golden Eagle, Christopher Spirit Award, Savannah Film Festival “Best in Festival,” Imagen Award, Clarion Award, Chicago Film Festival award, and New York Film Festival award, among others.