COHORT 3 PARTICIPANT

Mikayla Carson is a Toronto based producer creating award-winning commercial, documentary, and narrative content. Mikayla’s background in anthropology lends her a unique perspective and enables her to be a skilled creative mediator and storyteller, meshing the often disparate worlds of production management and narrative aesthetics. She prioritizes projects that centre marginalized voices and diverse viewpoints.

Mikayla began her career in film as a publicity assistant for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. Her first producing project was 12 animated shorts with legendary Pixar alumni Daisuke Tsutsumi for The Totoro Forest Project. This collaboration lead her to produce and shoot a short documentary for the not-for-profit organization Room to Read, in partnership with Indigenous artists in Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Mikayla has been a key team member for several successful CMF Experimental Fund and Bell Fund awards, securing over 2.5 million dollars in funding for new media projects. She also produced YYZ-GMSHW, an episodic VOD series for BellMedia, which dove into Toronto’s indie video game scene. Mikayla’s first narrative short film, Fastball (directed by Jeremy McCracken), was nominated for a CSC award. Her most recent narrative project, Between Us (a film directed by Cailleah Scott-Grimes), witnesses the strains and intimacies between a Japanese transgender man and his queer Canadian partner. The short film has won multiple awards and is presently on the festival circuit.

Currently, Mikayla has a series in development based on the best-selling novels The Blackthorn Key.