Abby Sun

Director of Programs and Editor of Documentary Magazine

Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and edited MIT Open Documentary Lab's Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker, Film Quarterly, Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, New Orleans, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. She has reviewed projects for IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, the Boston Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, EFM, and other film festivals.

In fall 2024, Abby researched media policy to support independent documentary filmmaking as a Shorenstein Documentary Film Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Abby was previously a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow. She produced Shared Resources (2021) and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Abby serves on the founding board of the Future Film Coalition, a research and policy hub for independent film in the U.S.; board of directors for Mezzanine, a non-profit building audiences for independent films in Los Angeles; and the arts advisory council of the Princess Grace Foundation. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.