Erin Semine Kökdil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator interested in building solidarity and inciting social change through film. Her work is an exploration of love and resistance, touching upon themes of migration, identity, motherhood, and belonging, and has screened at Hot Docs, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Camden International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, AFI Docs, Palm Springs International ShortFest, among others. Her work has been supported by SFFILM, Mountainfilm, Marble House Project Residency, Points North Institute, National Geographic, Fulbright, and featured on The New Yorker, KQED, and Means TV.
Erin holds a BA in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Smith College and an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2019 SFFilm Film House Residency and a 2020 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship.
Prior to becoming a filmmaker and entering academia, Erin worked extensively with non-profits and community-led initiatives in the U.S. and Guatemala. More recently, she served as the Post-Production Supervisor at a tech company focusing on video production, helped launch The Representation Project's Youth Media Academy, and co-founded Círculo Tejido, a collective in Oakland, California, focused on creating a community space for indigenous Maya women who are backstrap weavers and in the process of seeking asylum. She is the Head of Film and Visual Storytelling at the New American Story Project, a storytelling collective presenting oral histories of immigrants and refugees in order to bear witness, raise awareness, and provoke transformative conversation.
