Aimiende Negbenebor Sela

Aimiende Negbenebor Sela is a Writer-Director of Nigerian descent, adopted by a Jewish-Israeli family from the Bronx, and a Stevens Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award recipient in Arts and Humanities. Her award-winning short films have screened at numerous festivals across the world, and her feature screenplays have placed in several competitions including Screencraft Film Fund, Austin Film Festival and Cinestory Foundation Fellowship, and in the top 15% at Academy Nicoll Fellowships. Her latest screenplay, Utopia, made it to the second round at the 2018 Sundance Writer's Lab. As a prose writer, one of Aimiende's short stories, Peach Cobbler, was published in the summer 2016 issue of African Voices Magazine. A publication dedicated to fostering cultural understanding and awareness through literature, art, and film. Growing up as that kid glued to The Sound of Music, back in Nigeria, to the adult now dazzled by the complexity of the characters in 12 Angry Men, films have always helped Aimiende make sense of the world. As a result, her work interrogates the human condition, but with empathy; as she truly believes "we all live the same lives, we're just colored differently." Her production company, Sela Films LLC, was born out of this belief in order to help push the boundaries of innovation, inclusion, diversity and creativity with a focus on humanism. The company's slogan - "inclusivity inspires creativity." Hermit, her latest short film, a drama about a grieving husband coming to terms with this loss of his soulmate on a night that would've marked their eighteenth wedding anniversary is out on the festival circuit. Aimiende resides in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their fourteen year old Shih Tzu, Orlando.