The Stranger’s Genius Awards is an annual award recognizing the essential movers and shakers within the Seattle arts and culture scene. Every year, the local paper nominates three people for a Genius Award in categories like music, literature, art and film. This year, Washington Filmworks is excited that all three of the film nominees for the Stranger Genius Awards have worked with us in some capacity!

In June we featured nominee, filmmaker, and entrepreneur Sandy Cioffi, and a couple of weeks ago we wrote about indigenous activist and documentary filmmaker Tracy Rector. The third nominee to be highlighted in our blog is long-time Seattle film industry dynamo Mel Eslyn!

Film producer and production manager Mel Eslyn has been a powerhouse of the Seattle indie film industry for almost ten years now. In that short time, Eslyn has created an IMDb resume that reads like a novel. She’s held an array of jobs in the industry that speak to her depth of knowledge of the film industry: producer, writer, actress, assistant director, music supervisor (and more) on over two-dozen films.

And more than a few of them have been Washington Filmworks incentive films: the MTV series $5 Cover (2010), 21 and Over (directed by Jon Lucas, 2013), Safety Not Guaranteed (directed by Colin Trevorrow, 2013), the sci-fi thriller Half Life (formerly titled Deep Burial and filmed in 2013) and Four Minute Mile (2014).

She’s also worked with director Lynn Shelton as a producer on incentive films Laggies (2014) and Touchy Feely (2013), in addition to working on Humpday in 2009 and Your Sister’s Sister in 2011.

On set, Eslyn has a well-deserved reputation for building relationships among crew members. “I don’t just want to make great films,” she explained in the 2014 Sundance issue of Washington Film Magazine, “I want to support a community based around a common sense of values.” You can read the full article here.

We believe it is this very dedication to building and nurturing a film community in Seattle and Washington State that is what earned Eslyn a Genius Award nomination (for the second year in a row!). Congratulations to Eslyn and all the film nominees for this year’s Stranger Genius Awards!

To read more about Mel’s nomination, check out the Stranger piece about her here.