Maintaining consistency in a world where disruption seems to have become the norm, it gives me special pleasure to announce that our Sloan Film Summit will take place this May 2025, almost exactly three years after our last Summit in April 2022.

We welcome you all to this extraordinary gathering of talent focused on science and film, even as we acknowledge that we are living through a precarious moment in our nation’s history. As I wrote for our last Summit delayed for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, if the new normal is endless crises, then we must find ways to build and create—and to celebrate—even amidst the chaos and the ruins!

Part of Sloan’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology Program, the Sloan Film Summit celebrates the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s remarkable array of partners in its pioneering science and technology Film Program. That program has continued to grow and flourish as it supports the most innovative filmmakers and the best and most original new work that engages with science and technology themes and characters for the benefit of a general audience.

The 2025 Summit brings to Los Angeles the exciting new work of over 100 talented screenwriters and filmmakers from a dozen leading film schools and multiple film festivals and screenwriting development programs funded by the Sloan Foundation. The Summit also convenes leaders from these organizations and includes our partners in film distribution, curation and community building, science mentorship, our nationwide theater program, and our new YouTube & TikTok initiative.

Each year, over 30 of the best film students at the nation’s leading film schools receive screenwriting prizes and production grants ranging from $10,000 to $30,500 for incorporating science and technology into their films. Since the last Summit, among the finished Sloan short films, a Student Academy Award went to Neither Donkey Nor Horse by Robin Wang. A Student Grand Jury Prize is awarded annually to the “best of the best” of the Sloan screenplays, with The Science of a Slam Dunk (formerly known as James Thomas Thinks the Earth is Flat) by Anderson Cook, currently in pre-production. Since 2019, an annual Discovery Prize is awarded to the best screenplay from six new film schools added to our program with this year’s award going to Yoel Gebremariam’s Impact. A $100,000 post-graduate feature prize at NYU (which has since been increased to $150,000) has led to several films, most recently Mabel by Nicholas Ma, which premiered at last year’s SFFILM Festival.

The Foundation also recognizes completed feature films with festival prizes that have gone in the past three years to renowned films such as Oppenheimer, Twisters, and Blackberry and to outstanding indie directors such as Sam & Andy Zuchero, Sophie Barthes, and Matt Johnson.

As the Sloan Film Program matures, it increasingly focuses on developing and distributing feature-length screenplays that can be produced and released theatrically. Sloan’s major development partners—Sundance Institute, Film Independent, SFFILM, Athena Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Black List, and select collaborators—award fourteen development fellowships every year. They act as a “farm system” so that one script may receive support from several partners at different stages of development. Over 30 feature films developed by the Foundation for theatrical release have been beneficiaries of this pioneering, collaborative approach. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown and the 2023 strikes, several Sloan-supported projects were delayed and are ready to start shooting this year. In addition to The Science of a Slam Dunk, among those in pre-production are Mrittika ‘Mou’ Sarin’s Scarce, Cody Pearce’s White Tooth, Ziqi Yang’s Eclipse, Colin Rosemont’s If Ever: A Story of Fire, and Daeil Kim’s Eternal Cells.

After completion, the Foundation works with the Coolidge Corner Theater’s Science on Screen program to provide Sloan-funded films a distribution channel into theaters across the country. A Sloan Distribution Grant via Film Independent supports finished films entering the distribution phase or in the final stages of post-production.

And in deference to the growing quality and influence of streaming services, Sloan now includes grants for episodic writing with all its partners. Some of the most exciting new work in our pipeline now features episodic storylines. In addition, many Sloan playwrights supported by our theater program have become showrunners for successful series on television and streaming services, further enhancing the impact of our multi-media strategy that features scientific themes or characters. Our theater program has resulted in several successes, most recently Eureka Day by Jonathan Specter developed with Manhattan Theatre Club on Broadway and Dr. Semmelweis by Stephen Brown and Mark Rylance developed with the National Theater in the West End in London. The Ensemble Studio has produced several standout plays in the past two years, including Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s Smart, Nelson Diaz Marcano’s Las Borinqueñas, Lloyd Suh’s Frankinland and Michael Walek’s Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother?.

Last year, we also launched a new strand of the Public Understanding program to support creators on YouTube and other long- and short-form video platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. In partnership with the Independent Media Initiative, we awarded the inaugural Sloan Science Prizes for YouTube in fiction and nonfiction to Joe Posner and Xyla Foxlin, respectively, whose projects will be posted on their channels later this year. We have supported creators and channels of all sizes, from Adam Cole and Joss Fong’s Howtown, which grew to 750K+ subscribers in less than a year, to Hank Green’s hit science channel SciShow. With over 2.5 billion monthly active users worldwide, and 200 million in the US alone, YouTube is a powerhouse in the media space with the capacity to reach audiences of all ages. Sloan’s new YouTube & TikTok program reinforces Sloan’s commitment to support and honor talented creators who engage with science and technology regardless of their chosen platform.

The goal of the Sloan Film Prizes is to encourage the next generation of filmmakers to portray science and technology themes with originality and insight and to depict scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in a more realistic and entertaining fashion. The program is founded on the premise that science and technology, fundamental to the modern world and our progress as a species, are quintessentially human activities that offer filmmakers untapped opportunities: great stories, powerful ideas, and wonderful characters that have been largely unexplored.

While that mission once seemed well-intentioned but marginal, it has become increasingly popular and mainstream, even fashionable. The role of science in solving society’s most pressing issues, from COVID-19 to climate change, has become clearer (at least to most non-ideological observers), as has the indispensable role of scientists in securing our health, safety, and prosperity. And the growing power of technology, from the wonders of smartphones and electric vehicles to the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, have also become more salient.

This program represents a wonderful opportunity for filmmakers and creators willing to engage more deeply with the underlying questions posed by scientific and technological challenges as well as with the complex, brilliant individuals working in these fields. For better or worse, these all too human beings have shaped and continue to shape the world that we live in.

Thanks to our amazing grantees, the Sloan imprimatur has become a “brand” synonymous not just with science but with excellence across the arts. And the Foundation is regarded as a top talent aggregator whose annual lists of winning filmmakers and screenwriters are carefully studied by producers, managers, agents, and film houses across the country. Even our book lists provide rich fodder for Hollywood, with American Prometheus: The Tragedy and Triumph of J. Robert Oppenheimer—a Sloan-supported book published two decades ago that won the Pulitzer Prize—adapted by Christopher Nolan into the Oscar-winning, star-studded hit film Oppenheimer in 2023. Another Sloan-supported book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures.

Anyone who flips through these pages will see an exhilarating range of approaches and genres, from drama, action, thrillers, exposes, and biopics to comedy, satire, musicals, science fiction, adventure, allegory, and historical epics. “Sloan Studios,” a nonprofit independent home for attracting the finest new filmmakers and developing great science-themed films, is alive and thriving, and it is needed now more than ever!

This publication of award-winning works produced every three years is, above all, about talented and aspiring young filmmakers who have let their imaginations roam into uncharted terrain. They have sought to dramatize elusive or difficult narratives and often opaque, mystifying characters—or to take familiar stories with people we thought we knew—and to show us how this material impacts our lives and why it’s different or more frightening or more beautiful than we thought. In doing this, they have tried to do what artists of all times and ages have done: to push a little further against the darkness and to increase our knowledge of who we are, where we came from and where we are headed.

Doron Weber

Vice President & Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation