Emerging Voices in Native Cinema

Oklahoma is home to a thriving Native film scene. This engaging panel features three Indigenous filmmakers—Shea Vassar Gomez (Cherokee), Paris Burris (Chickasaw), and Katie Hoffman-Faulk (Cherokee/Shawnee)—sharing their current projects, past work, and creative practices.

Co-presented by Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the panel is curated and moderated by Tulsa Artist Fellow Colleen Thurston as part of LitFest, with support from Tulsa Film Collective.

About Shea Vassar Gomez

Shea Vassar (Cherokee) is a writer and comedian who is currently working on her first short film Julie Takes a Walk. She dabbles in various creative mediums to tell stories that utilize existentialism and dark humor to assess Indigenous diaspora, connection to land, generational trauma, and the irony of being alive. She has also worked as a freelance journalist for the last seven years. Shea’s bylines have been featured by publications like Men’s Health, Roger Ebert, and Slate and she is a frequent guest on the NPR podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour.

About Paris Burris

Paris Burris is a filmmaker and film programmer based in Oklahoma City. She serves as the Short Film Programmer for deadCenter Film Festival, Oklahoma’s largest and only Oscar®-qualifying film festival, and is the founder of Femme Film, a monthly series dedicated to showcasing films made by femmes for free to the Oklahoma community. Paris shares her insights on Indigenous media through the Reel Indigenous Podcast and is passionate about creating independent films with her friends. She is also dedicated to discovering and sharing underseen films with wider audiences. A proud citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Paris is deeply committed to amplifying diverse voices in film.

About Katie Hoffman-Faulk

Katie Hoffman-Faulk is an Oklahoma-based filmmaker and producer who specializes in creating strong, relatable, female-centric stories, inspired primarily by her life in Oklahoma. She co-wrote the Native short Western Skies: Toohoom-pai-ahv (The Southern Paiute Sky) and has written and directed two short films. Her first feature, Push County (currently in development) is a crime-thriller, set in Choctaw Nation, OK. She is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation with Shawnee and Delaware ancestry.

About Colleen Thurston

Colleen Thurston is a filmmaker and film curator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Colleen has produced for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, PBS, and federal, tribal and non profit organizations. Her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide and has received support from Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, the Redford Center and Creative Capital. Her feature film documentary about the cycle of displacement from resource extraction and the fate of Oklahoma’s Kiamichi River, Drowned Land, recently premiered at the 2025 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, and held state premieres in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Los Angeles, California as part of Color Congress’ Elev8Docs Marketing Experiment. Colleen is the founder of the Indigenous Moving Image Archive project, and has curated film programs for institutions such as the Momentary (Bentonville, AR), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), UCLA Film and Television Archives and Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA) and numerous film festivals. Colleen is the project producer for the Indigenous video series Native Lens (Rocky Mountain PBS / KSUT Tribal Radio), and a senior programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Colleen is a 2024-25 International Documentary Association Fellow and a 2025-2027 Tulsa Artist Fellow. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

For more information about the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, click here.

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