Every year the Adrienne Shelly Foundation and the Nantucket Film Festival recognize a promising female feature filmmaker with the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Excellence in Filmmaking Award. The awardee receives a $5,000 grant in honor and remembrance of writer, director and actor, Adrienne Shelly and her contributions to film.

This year's recipient is IRENE TAYLOR BRODSKY, director of the feature documentary, BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN.

Irene is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and on television worldwide. Her first feature film, Hear and Now, a documentary memoir about her deaf parents, won the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival in 2007, and went on to win numerous Jury and Audience awards around the world, a 2008 Peabody Award, and a nomination for Documentary of the Year by the Producer’s Guild of America.

Irene’s most recent feature film, BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN, is a haunting exploration of an Internet Bogeyman and two 12-year-old girls who attempted to kill for him. BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN will air on HBO in 2016.

Irene has also worked as a journalist with CBS News Sunday Morning, and for 10 years worked as a Himalayan mountain guide. She is graduate of New York University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She founded the production company Vermilion Films in 2006.

BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN plays the Nantucket Film Festival on June 22 and 23. Irene will be in attendance at both screenings.