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The Museum of the Moving Image and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced the winners of the 2025 Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize and Sloan Student Discovery Prize, representing the best of Sloan’s nationwide film program.
The winners of the Grand Jury and Discovery Prize are, respectively: Quinn Spicker (AFI) for his feature script “God Makers” and Nora Kaye (Brooklyn College) for her feature script “The Head Cases.”
Per today’s official announcement, Spicker’s script follows the “true story for the battle over ChatGPT, academic researcher Helen Toner takes on tech-industrialist Sam Altman in an attempt to control the future of AI.” Kaye is the first filmmaker from Brooklyn College to win the Discovery Prize and her script is chronicles “two brilliant, stubborn women — a rebellious young scientist and her exacting former professor — [who] must overcome their mutual hatred to save the professor’s fading mind, testing their unorthodox Alzheimer’s treatment in a high stakes experiment that blurs the line between genius and recklessness.”
Spicker and Kaye will each receive $20,000, industry exposure, and year-round mentorship from both a science advisor and a film industry professional. They will be celebrated on April 9 at the Museum of the Moving Image with a work-in-progress script reading, cocktail reception, and other festivities — open to the public (RSVPs will open soon).
Established in 2011 (Grand Jury Prize) and expanded in 2019 (Discovery Prize), the Sloan Student Prizes aim to advance the professional paths of diverse, emerging filmmakers as they transition from school into the film industry.
For the past 26 years, the Sloan Foundation has awarded annual screenwriting prizes at six partner film schools, and each school nominates one winning candidate for the best-of-the-best Grand Jury Prize. The Discovery Prize represents an expansion of the Sloan film program to six public universities who each submit an original screenplay that has not previously won a Sloan prize.
This year’s winners were chosen from 10 finalists by a jury of scientists and filmmakers that included filmmaker Jonathan Bogarín (“306 Hollywood”), Dr. Gabriela Chiosis (The Gabriela Chiosis Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Dr. Justus Kebschull (The Kebschull Lab at John Hopkins University), filmmaker Robert Kolodny (“The Featherweight”), filmmaker Eliza McNitt (“SPHERES”), filmmaker Tasha Van Zandt (“A Life Illuminated”), and Team ORCA founder Dr. Edie Widder.
“We’re delighted to give our annual Grand Jury and Discover Prizes to Quinn Spicker’s ‘God Makers’ and Nora Kaye’s ‘The Head Cases,’” wrote Doron Weber, vice president and program director at the Sloan Foundation, in an official statement. “Both projects, one about a female engineer ensnared in Sam Altman’s takeover of OpenAI and the other about the shifting relationship between two female scientists working on Alzheimer’s research, spotlight the role of women in STEM and the importance of collaboration and empathy in science and technology.”
This marks the fifth year that the Sloan Student Prizes are awarded under the stewardship of the Museum of the Moving Image. Their stewardship is part of the Museum’s wider Sloan Science & Film initiative, which “provides opportunities for the creation, distribution, exhibition, and discussion of films that amplify understanding of scientific themes.”
In choosing its winners, the jury provided citations that speak to the strengths of each script. Spicker’s script is “keenly constructed and propulsively written, … [and] tackles a pivotal moment in human history. In anchoring the script in the perspective of a woman in STEM, Quinn Spicker has crafted a fresh, nuanced take on the story audiences think they know about Sam Altman, ChatGPT, and the future of artificial intelligence.”
As for Kaye’s script, the jury noted that by “balancing relatable emotional stakes with laugh-out-loud humor, ‘The Head Cases’ distinctive tone and sparkling dialogue make it an engrossing read. Nora Kaye’s charming two-hander explores the personal motivations and ethical challenges faced by scientists who devote their careers to combatting devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
The jury also awarded honorable mention to Grand Jury Prize finalist Ellie Melick (Carnegie Mellon University) for her feature script “SLEDHEAD,” which follows what happens “when her cousin — and hero — loses a long battle with mental illness, U.S.A. Skeleton athlete Ingrid Anderson puts her Olympic dreams on the line to help neurological researchers investigate how sliding sports damage the brain.”
English (US) ·