About the Filmmakers

Mayer\Leyva is performance artist Jillian Mayer and retired playwright Lucas Leyva. Their collaborations include short films, art installations, music videos, experimental theater, and web projects.

Their last two short films (Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke; #PostModem) premiered at Sundance and went on to play AFI, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Winterthur, New Zealand and festivals all over the world. In 2012 four separate Mayer\Leyva projects were screened at SXSW and in 2013 they returned with another.

Named to Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces of Independent Film” list, their projects have also screened at museums worldwide including MoMA, Guggenheim Museums, New Orleans Contemporary and the permanent collection of the Miami Art Museum. This year they were selected for the New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship at the Sundance Institute.

Their music videos have been featured by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vice, Stereogum, and NME and have been named to various year-end Top10 video lists, including IFC.

They have made three viral videos, including I Am Your Grandma, which became an unlikely sensation that has been spoofed on various TV shows and was featured on the cover of Art Papers Magazine, and the controversial Jacuzzi Boys: Glazin’ which became infamous after getting over 600,000 views in 48 hours before being banned from YouTube permanently and becoming the subject of a SXSW Panel.

They have been awarded grants from the Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban-American Artists, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Elsewhere Museum/ National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Harpo Foundation, the Zentrum Paul Klee Museum Fellowship (Switzerland), and the South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship.

Together they help run the Borscht Corporation and the Borscht Film Festival in Miami, where they work and live with Shivers, their wise and benevolent miniature chihuahua.

website: mayerleyva.com