ABOUT DAWN
Dawn Valadez is a queer, Xicana, filmmaker, social worker, artist, youth development specialist, resource wrangler, and impact strategist. Raised by her Mexican-American single mother, she never planned on being a filmmaker. Her award-winning, ITVS-funded, feature documentary (with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan), Going on 13, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. As co-director and producer with Katie Galloway, Dawn is spearheading The Pushouts impact campaign. The Pushouts engages audiences through a character driven story of Victor Rios, a “dropout,” 3-time felon, and now nationally recognized expert on the “school-to-prison” pipeline and beloved professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara.
Dawn’s media work focuses on race, class, education and coming of age in the 21st Century U.S. Her work is supported by the Ford Foundation/Just Films, Sundance Documentary Fund, Tribeca All Access, the California Humanities Council, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Latino Public Broadcasting, the San Francisco Foundation, Fledgling Fund, the Jonathon Logan Family Foundation, and others. She’s been awarded numerous awards and honors, including, most recently, the Al Bendich Berkeley Film Foundation Award (2017), a Chicago Media Project Impact Prize (2018) and the Imagen Awards' Best Documentary Award (2018). Formerly on the board of the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Dawn advises on documentary films and public engagement campaigns and acts as a review panelist for a range of public documentary and other media funders.
In production on a queer episodic program, Dawn is a recipient of the See It, Be It Filmmaker Fellowship from the Geena Davis Bentonville Film Foundation. Past residencies and fellowship programs she has received include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Producer's Academy, the Sundance Lab / Skoll Foundation's Stories of Change Initiative, the BAVC Media Makers Fellowship, NALIP's Latino Producers Academy and Media Market and the Women of Color Filmmakers' Artist Residency Center.
A proud graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, Dawn has over 25 years of experience as a social worker and non-profit service & development professional. Her boutique consulting business supports the fundraising efforts of non-profit organizations. She has a strong track record in developing fundraising plans, cultivating donors and sponsors, researching grants and securing foundation funds, and winning successful contracts with government entities—for capital, programmatic, & operational campaigns. Dawn is a bold advocate for underserved populations, especially children and youth, students, low-income people, LGBTQIA+ communities, and people of color. She has raised over $50 million in government grants, private foundation, and donor funds. She lives and works in Oakland, California.