Meet our 2026 Short Film Jury
Introducing the short film jury for Flatpack no.20:
Best Short Film & WTF Award Jury
Short Film Award: £1,000 cash prize / WTF Award: £500 cash prize
Ugbad Yussuf is a curator, writer and filmmaker from Birmingham, based in London. She is currently Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, where she has worked on exhibitions including Wes Anderson: The Archives and The Nue Black Aesthetic. Previously, she co-curated the exhibition akâmi- at Camden Art Centre, as a 2024-5 Curatorial Fellow of New Curators, and worked in the Exhibitions team at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Her practice spans film programming, socially engaged curating and archival research, with a particular interest in political cinema, diasporic histories and moving image culture. She is also a member of Radical Exhibition Collective, producing community screenings and public events.
Lucile Bourliaud is a short film programmer who has been collaborating with various international festivals for the past 13 years. She was part of the Flatpack team from 2015 to 2022. She works with the Brest European Short Film Festival (France) and Nordisk Panorama (Sweden) among other events. She also writes for Underdog, a webzine she's created with her Flatpack colleague Max.
Animation Award Jury
£300 Cash Prize
Seema Mattu is a Valmiki world-building artist, whose multimodal practice follows the logic of a speculative theme park - known as SEEMAWORLD. With its own internal lore, SEEMAWORLD is hosted by fantastical deities who act as vessels for interweaving strands of output. Rooted in British South Asian culture (and its relationship to Birmingham), speculative storytelling unfolds through immersive real life environments, sculpture, mixed-media animation, moving image and an emergent folk sound. These works combine filmic, sonic and spatial spectacle to explore and subvert complex themes centring: systems of caste, queer desire and technological iterations (and reiterations) of thing and self.
Seema’s work has been shown widely, including projects with: Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, New Art City, Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong), Film London (FLAMIN Fellowship 2021-2022), and Wysing Arts Centre (2023 Residency). In 2021, she was awarded an International Digital Fellowship at QUAD (Derby), leading to her first solo show in 2023. She has been an Incidental Artist at Eastside Projects (Birmingham) since 2024 and will launch a solo exhibition in 2026 - which will evolve across FACT (Liverpool) in 2026 and Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea) in 2027.
Michael D. Kennedy is a British cartoonist and illustrator living in Birmingham. He is best known for his comics collection Milk White Steed and illustrations for the New Yorker. His work ranges from surreal autofiction to historical genre narratives that explore themes of social tension, racial identity and introspection.
Released by influential underground and alternative comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, Milk White Steed was named in The Guardian's '2025 best graphic novels of the year' list and is currently a finalist for the 2026 LA Times 'Book Prize in the Graphic Novel category.'
Colour Box Jury
£300 Cash Prize
Rosie Abbey is an arts educator and producer based in Birmingham, specialising in youth voice and co-creation. She is currently Birmingham Programme Manager at Open City, a charity dedicated to making architecture and cities more accessible.
Screendance Jury
£300 Cash Prize
Louise Katerega trained at London Contemporary Dance School, Coventry University (Performing Arts) and holds a first-class degree in Film and Literature from the University of Warwick. A versatile contributor to the UK dance scene for over three decades, her broad portfolio career has led her into many job roles on stage, in studio, around meeting tables and currently largely behind a desk as Head of Professional Development at People Dancing.
Louise is a trustee of Phoenix Dance Theatre, supports on the MA in Participation, Communities, Activism at The Place/University of East London and pursues her own creative adventures through Pathways House Collective.
Shekinah Yuhanna is a Communications Officer at Fabric, working across social media and digital storytelling to connect audiences with dance. With a background in digital marketing, Shekinah develops platform-led content that’s both strategic and audience-aware.
Alongside this, they've led and judged dance film commissions at Fabric, exploring how their curatorial translate across across formats, from social-first storytelling to cinematic screen work. Shekinah's work blends strategy, audience insight and creative direction.
Optical Sound Jury
£300 Cash Prize
Matt Watkin’s practice has evolved from a DIY attitude and a fearless approach towards experimentation in visual art, music, performance & technology.
Matt worked with Jamie Hewlett for 10 years as a creative director on the virtual-band Gorillaz developing the award-winning website, animations and live show visuals.
Matt’s experimental music/AV project is Mothwasp; stark, oblique, distorted and serendipitous; live performances invariably involve near-defunct analogue AV technologies, field recordings, homemade electronics and sensory barrage. Mothwasp have performed during film festivals such as Animated Dreams/Black Nights (Estonia) Flatpack (UK) and at music festivals such as Supersonic and Supernormal (UK).
A fiercely independent trailblazer, Lucy McLauchlan’s monochromatic large-scale murals have shown internationally her collaborators list including Gorillaz, Banksy's Pictures on Walls, the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, BLK/MRKT Gallery, the Eclectic Gallery in Tokyo, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I-D, Vogue, Relax and Lodown magazines, a long-running relationship with Studio Cromie’s Famé Festival (Grottaglie, Italy); exhibitions in San Fransisco and Los Angeles; See No Evil (Bristol, UK); projects with Lazarides Gallery in London; The New Art Gallery Walsall and close relationships with the Keep-A-Breast foundation (US).
Book tickets to our Short Film Competition screenings (including our Awards Do) here.