(updated May, 2007)
Shani Heckman has been producing queer events and art, for over ten years, in the Bay Area. In 2006, she was awarded the San Francisco Weekly's Best of the Bay Award for her many years of producing events and coordinating the publicity campaigns of various international queer artists. In early 2000, Shani began focusing on her own art and performed regularly as a Drag King, (Stockholm, Sweden Winner, 2001). Drag King performance led her to filmmaking in that many people were shooting Drag King performances for various films.
Shani was a recipient of Film Arts Foundation's Support Training and Access for New Directors (STAND) Grant, in 2003, for her first short film, Another Day, an experimental, lyrical, silent short that explored gender fluidity and starred local musician and performance artist Storm Florez. Her next film, Wrong Bathroom (2005), a short documentary about restroom access, which received the Queer Cultural Center's Creating Queer Community Grant and funds from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for its completion, is currently touring the International festival circuit.
Currently, Shani is working on a feature-length documentary America's Most Unwanted about Foster Youth who dismantle their statistics; the project received the Tee Corinne prize for Lesbian Media Grant. In addition, she is writing a narrative feature about a young girl coming of age without parents but with access to lots of cash and drugs, inspired by Requiem for a Dream and Basketball Diaries.
Shani has raised thousands of dollars for other queer film projects including Live!Nude!Girls!UNITE! (Query, 2001), Healing Sex (SIR Video/Haines, 2004) and Godspeed (Breedlove, 2007). In addition to making films and assisting in fundraising, she also has curated sold out screenings at various San Francisco venues that featured local and international queer shorts. She has worked on numerous film projects as gaffer, camera assistant and editor as well as designed and taught DIY Hands-On Video Workshops. In addition to her background in film, Heckman, is an independent publicist for emerging and national queer artists, her clients have been featured on HBO, in the Utne & Progressive magazines and on the covers of various queer magazines. She has an award in Film Production from City College San Francisco, a B.A. in Global Economics from UC-Santa Cruz and an affinity for budgets and numbers.