Erica Tremblay

“Growing up as a queer Indigenous woman, I always felt drawn to telling stories about two-spirit and Indigenous people. Filmmaking gives me that avenue,” says Erica Tremblay, a 2018 Sundance Native Lab Fellow, Clio Award winner, and Atlanta Film Festival winner whose films have been seen on PBS and the Independent Film Channel. Recent collaborators include the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, the Alaska Native Women’s Coalition, and the Monument Quilt Project. Erica is also an executive in the media industry, having worked at publishing companies including Hearst and Bustle. Her work includes Heartland: A Portrait of Survival, a documentary about a deadly tornado, and In the Turn, a documentary about a 10-year-old trans girl who who discovers roller derby through a queer collective. Unlike her subject in that film, though, Tremblay was not out at such a young age. “Coming out was a long process for me. I had always known I was queer but had never seen that lifestyle represented. As soon as I moved from the Midwest to California, the whole world opened up for me and I felt more comfortable being myself. I wasn’t fully out until my late twenties. It definitely took me awhile, but now I never look back.” —GH