FESTIVAL
HONORED GUESTS
Every year the LightReel Film Festival hosts special guests and honorees recognized during the festival.
2024 Honorees
KiKi Layne
Black Butterfly Recipient for Acting
Kiandra "KiKi" Layne is best known for her starring roles in such films as the romantic drama If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), the drama Native Son (2019), the action superhero film The Old Guard (2020), and the romantic comedy Coming 2 America (2021).
Layne's first acting role was with Lena Waithe in the pilot for the drama series The Chi, filmed in 2015. Her breakout role was in Barry Jenkins' 2018 drama If Beale Street Could Talk. She starred in the 2019 screen adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, then alongside Charlize Theron in 2020's The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood.
Black Reel Award winner, Layne was featured in composer Max Richter's Voices, which was inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The album contains readings of the Declaration by Eleanor Roosevelt and Layne, with a further 70 readings by people around the world.
In 2021, she joined the cast alongside Eddie Murphy in the Amazon Prime sequel Coming 2 America.
Layne is from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Brenda Gilbert
Black Butterfly Recipient for Producing
Brenda Gilbert is the Co-Founder & President of BRON, a company she co-founded with her husband Aaron L. Gilbert in 2010. The BC-based parent company BRON Media Corp. has global divisions which include BRON Studios, BRON Creative, BRON Animation, BRON Releasing, BRON Digital, BRON Life, and an affiliate media fund, BRON Ventures. Brenda previously served as President of BRON Animation, where she produced and recently delivered the original animated film The Willoughbys to Netflix. Currently, her focus is on BRON Life, the company’s non-scripted division, where she’s passionate about giving a voice to those who need one.
Much of Brenda’s time is also spent on BRON’s charitable initiatives and on being a BRON ambassador to the world. She sits on the board of Film Independent, is the track chair for mentoring initiatives with Women in Animation, and is an advisor to the Vancouver Film School and La Salle College. Over her 20 years in the media and entertainment space, Gilbert has produced or executive produced several animated and live-action films, including The Joker, The Birth of a Nation, Monster, Assassination Nation, and The Nightingale. Her background includes many years at the British Columbia Securities Commission where she worked in the Finance, Enforcement, Legal & Communications Divisions.
Stephanie Filo
Black Butterfly Recipient for Editing
Stephanie Filo, ACE is a four-time Emmy, as well as Peabody and ACE Eddie Award-winning Film/Television Editor and activist based in Los Angeles, CA, and Sierra Leone, West Africa. She serves on the board for Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone, a social impact and feminist-based organization for Sierra Leonean girls aged 11-16. She is one of the co-founders of End Ebola Now, an organization created in 2014 to spread accurate information and awareness about the Ebola Virus and its impact through artistic community activism.
Aside from editing television and film, Stephanie spends much of her spare time producing and editing social action campaigns and documentaries, primarily focused on the rights of women and girls worldwide. In 2021, she won a Primetime Emmy award for her work on HBO's "A Black Lady Sketch Show", making her team the first all-Women of Color editing team to take home the award for Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming. In 2022, she made history again as a member of the first all-black editing team to be nominated for and win both an Emmy and an ACE Eddie for "A Black Lady Sketch Show". Most recently in 2023, she has made history again, as the first Picture Editor and first Black editor to ever be Emmy nominated for 3 different series at the same time.
Dr. Myrtis Bedolla
Black Butterfly Recipient for Art
Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.
Established in 2006, the mission of the gallery is to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression.
Bedolla has recently gained national press in the New York Times article “Black Gallerists Press Forward Despite a Market That Holds Them Back” in June 2020 and authored “Why My Blackness is Not a Threat to your Whiteness” in Cultured Magazine in July 2020. Past coverage also includes being voted Best Gallery by the Baltimore Sun in 2017; “Black Art in the Spotlight,” Baltimore Magazine, September 2018; “Living with Art: Myrtis Bedolla Builds a Home and Gallery in Old Goucher,” BMORE Art, Issue 3; “Women in the Arts,” which honored women at the helm of the Baltimore art scene, Baltimore Style Magazine, October 2013.
