Each fellow receives funding and welcomed into a vibrant, lasting community of professional artists and filmmakers.
StorySeeds creates space for new storytellers to step into their screenwriting journey, build essential skills, and grow the confidence to trust their creative voice.
The screenplays developed during the program can serve as strong foundations for applying to grants, residencies, and other opportunities.
StorySeeds marks the beginning of a powerful and transformative filmmaking journey.
Applications for StorySeeds 2025 are closed and will reopen Spring 2026
2025 STORYSEEDS FELLOWS & MENTOR
TXHEE BELINDA XIONG
YONI LIGHT
JOHANNA KELLER FLORES
KIRA BUNKHOLT
NEL MUÑOZ
RAVEN JOHNSON
StorySeeds Screenwriting Mentor & Facilitator
StorySeeds Screenwriting Mentor & Facilitator
Nel Muñoz (she/her) is a filmmaker, musician, and cook who has worked in the service industry for 10 plus years. With her art and community work, she is working to create a world that the kid version of her would love.
She studied theater at Augsburg University from 2015-2018, in 2019 she directed and wrote her first short film "Kids See Ghosts", she makes music under the moniker "Zant Peralta" which is fusion of hip-hop and electronic dance music influences, she is also one of the founders of The Brass Strap an upcoming cooperatively owned queer/lesbian bar coming to Minneapolis. She is one of the stars of a locally produced trans rom-com web series Transplant.
Fun House
A college student comes home to house sit for her parents. Only to find out the house seems to bring the worst things out of her.
Txhee Belinda Xiong (she/her) is a Hmong-American female artist based in the Twin Cities. She holds a B.A. in English, Creative Writing, and a minor in Women in the Arts from St. Catherine University. Her written work has appeared in Hmong Pages, the Minnesota Historical Society’s MNopedia, the Hmong Museum’s 2022 Digital Zine, and the 2023 Celebrate Hmong magazine.
Beyond writing, Txhee explores storytelling through filmmaking as a member of the APIA MN Film Collective. Her creative practice centers on representation particularly for Hmong, Asian, and BIPOC communities while also exploring themes of mental health, generational trauma, and feminist narratives.
She is also a community advocate, raising awareness about sexual assault in the Hmong community through her “#kuvthiab #metoo” t-shirt project, using the proceeds to curate care packages for survivors. Txhee is currently a recipient of the MSAB 2024 Creative Support for Individuals grant, supporting her forthcoming short film.
Chinese Vampire
Two Hmong female college students venture into the wilderness of Minnesota for a camping trip to challenge societal norms. However, they unexpectedly encounter a 400-year-old Chinese Vampire who emerges from her burial and asks for their help in finding her way back to China.
Johanna Keller Flores (she/her) is a Peruvian-American artist, born and raised on the Dakota Land of St. Paul, Minnesota. She is a writer, performer, administrator, and local hard working Virgo. As a playwright she has written ANGELITA, Marixa y La Depre, Mal Ojo, and other plays and pieces. Johanna’s writing exists in the spaces where queerness, mixed Peruana identity, and generations of magic come together across time, reality and music. She is a 2025 MSAB Creative Individuals Grantee, and a member of Exposed Brick Theater’s Playwriting Cohort.
Johanna was also a 2023 LAMBDA Literary Playwriting Fellow, the 2022-2023 Many Voices Mentee at the Playwright's Center, a Teatro del Pueblo Visiones Fellow in 2023, a Q-Stage fellow in 2023 and an OurSpace Fellow with Twin Cities Media Alliance in 2021.
She has the sincerest pleasure of creating and collaborating in her Twin Cities home; writing, performing, and stage managing with Pangea World Theatre, the Playwright’s Center, Twin Cities Media Alliance, Mixed Blood Theater, Turtle Theater Collective, Teatro del Pueblo, Exposed Brick Theatre, Full Circle Theatre, Lightning Rod, the Jungle Theater, 20% Theatre, Gadfly Theatre, BareBones Productions, Threshold Theater and Alliance for Latinx Minnesota Artists. Johanna has worked in the film world as an actress, casting director, and acting coach. Te mando muchisimo amor, ya?
I am a Garden
How does a queer break up also plant seeds in a garden for something new?
Kira Bunkholt (any pronouns) is a multi-genre writer, theorist, filmmaker, singer-songwriter, and organizer from Saint Paul, MN. Their multidisciplinary practice explores love, revolution, spiritual transformation, and collective healing—guided by the question: Why am I here? Rooted in both personal and political storytelling, Kira’s work draws from Black feminist traditions of truth-telling, community care, and interconnectedness with each other and the earth. Their art is a continuous negotiation of relationship, identity, and self-confrontation.
Kira has performed throughout the Twin Cities, led poetry workshops, facilitated conversations on disability justice and creativity, and supported grassroots artists through grant writing. Their work has appeared in Salty Magazine and other platforms. They are currently a fellow in More Than A Single Story’s Go Back and Fetch It cohort for emerging Black writers.
Sat.
In a society that manufactures suffering, Kaye, a Black queer woman in her twenties living with mental illness, battles her ‘inner demons’ through therapy, ritual, self-reflection, and just plain survival. Despite all the reasons to give her thoughts, she lives another day.
Yoni Light (she/her) is a Black and Indigenous multi-hyphenate artist and filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work explores lineage, self-sovereignty, and expression as vital tools of survival and transformation within the Black and queer diaspora. Drawing from movement, dance, and visual storytelling, Yoni’s films blend performance and poetics to create meditative and evocative portraits of becoming.
She is a 2023-2024 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre, a 2023 Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Individuals grantee, and a 2025-2026 recipient of the Nexus Roots Sabbatical Grant. Her one-woman show In Search of Her: The Girl In Search of the Goddess, premiered as part of the Naked Stages performance series and featured 4 short original film work alongside live performance. (Filmed & Edited by Awa Mally + Produced by Ruby Red)
Yoni is the co-founder of Vogue Down MPLS, a queer ballroom collective reviving and celebrating ballroom culture in the Twin Cities. She is also a creative consultant for OurSpace Minnesota, a queer BIPOC-led organization advancing health, housing, and holistic care in Minneapolis.
In film, Yoni has contributed as a movement director (Love is Like, dir. Ibimina Thompson), assistant director, and (Water Closet, dir. Mariah Hansen). She is currently expanding her own directorial practice, developing narrative and experimental projects that center liberation, imagination, and sacred memory.
Sacred Ties
A queer Black woman grapples with loss and identity as the spirits of her ancestors and chosen family guide her toward healing, reminding her that even in absence, love endures and lineage lives on.
2024 STORYSEEDS SCREENWRITING MENTOR
Raven Johnson is a Liberian-American filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work explores the realities of Black experiences in predominantly White spaces around the midwest. Raven is an assistant professor of Moving Images at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She received her MFA in Filmmaking from NYU Tisch.
Raven is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow, a 2022 Locarno Film resident in Switzerland, a 2021 Jerome Foundation Artist Development Grant recipient, a 2021 Jerome Emerging Artist-in-Residence at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and a 2019-2020 Cannes Cinéfondation resident in Paris. In 2017, Raven was also named one of AT&T’s Emerging Filmmakers.
Her short films THE TRUCKER and TWEEN have played in dozens of film festivals including Palm Springs Shortfest, Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival, BFI, Denver Film Festival, and Cleveland International Film Festival.
Raven is in development on her debut feature which has already received support from SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.
Click here to view 2024 StorySeeds Fellows