Maya Simone is an award-winning filmmaker in her final year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro majoring in Media Studies and minoring in African American and African Diaspora Studies.
In 2025, Maya was awarded the Silberman Family Emerging Filmmaker Scholarship from Uptilt Film Fest. In 2024, “Mouseshrooms,” a film Maya co-wrote, won Best Film and Runner Up: Writing at the 2024 Film48 Greensboro Competition.
She is currently a Lloyd International Honors College Pubantz Artist-in-Residence Program fellow, where she was awarded a grant to write and direct Rosa’s Dilemma, a romantic comedy short film. The film will premiere at the Pubantz Artist-in-Residence Showcase in April 2025.
In 2023 Maya was accepted into the Gotham Film and Media Institute's Gotham EDU Film And Media Career Development Program where she received the Sidney Poitier Initiative Scholarship that covered the full tuition of the program. Later that year, she became an HBCU 20x20 | The Application + Martian Blueberry Writing Fellow, a program led by animation veteran Carl Jones, renowned for his work on The Boondocks and Black Dynamite.
In her narrative films, Maya aims to create the kind of stories her younger self longed to see growing up, while exploring genres such as romantic comedies and surrealism in the process. In Maya's documentaries, she hopes to amplify voices of underrepresented communities, with a focus on stories that reflect the Black Diaspora.