Please join the Center for Gender and Sexuality for a screening of the short film Well, written by Toni Cunningham and co-directed by Toni Cunningham and Executive Producer Eden Sabolboro. Following the screening, Toni and Eden will be joined by Paige Wood, creative producer on the film, for a discussion of the film.

Well depicts the story of one Black American family through 50 years as they fight to stay healthy amidst three different crises.

Through the Tuskegee Experiment, the Flint Water Crisis, and now COVID-19, the family has survived endless obstacles to their health. After losing a loved one to COVID-19, the family must reckon with the harm and distrust that has permeated their family for decades.

TONI CUNNINGHAM

Toni Cunningham is an independent filmmaker and the founder of Splash of Tonic Media LLC. Her first film, Good Grief, premiered in the Detroit Voices competition at the Cinetopia Film Festival in 2019. Since then, Toni has written, produced, and directed films in multiple formats and is currently developing both short and feature-length projects. She is a former Kresge Arts Fellow in screenwriting and a Redford Center Environmental Documentary Grantee for her producing work on the feature-length documentary Sacrifice Zones: the 48217. She is the producer of the award-winning short film T-Minus, and she is a Black Public Media grantee for her work as writer/co-director/producer of the short narrative film Well, which premiered in 2024 and screened at Oscar-Qualifying festivals Reel Sisters of the Diaspora and BronzeLens Film Festival. She is currently the Co-Director of Film Production for the Obsidian Theatre Festival, and a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in Media Arts and Studies at Wayne State University. 

EDEN SABOLBORO

My work focuses on capturing authentic, immersive human interest stories especially from underrepresented perspectives. I am co-founder of Reel Clever Films LLC, a boutique production company specializing in non-fiction storytelling and branded content. With over ten years of high level expertise in the film and video production industry, I have produced an immersive body of work for the media, non-profit and education sector, Fortune 500 companies, the local creative arts and small business communities, and leading political and civic advocacy organizations. My work has received two Michigan Emmy awards, as well as exhibited and juried in various local, international, and Academy-qualifying film festivals.

I participated in a few key labs and fellowships, namely the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Program, the Sundance Institute Creative Producing Lab (Detroit), and Firelight Media’s Groundwork Lab. I am a part of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, as well as the Asian-American Documentary Network. In 2021, I served as the Supervising Producer for “Shifting Urban Narratives,” a multimedia fellowship for young Detroiters by Wayne State University and the Schultz Family Foundation to tell their stories about change, resilience, joy, and community development. In 2022, I worked with women-led production house MAJORITY to co-direct “Year One of the Biden-Harris Administration” for the Biden-Harris Inaugural Committee.

Some of my recent projects as producer & director include the Webby-nominated "Senghor Reid: Make Way for Tomorrow" for the second season of PBS American Masters' and Firelight Media's "In The Making" Series; “Into the Sugarbush” an official selection for the TED Countdown Summit in Detroit, and “WELL” a narrative-documentary hybrid film funded by Black Public Media and is official selection for the 2024 BronzeLens Film Festival in Atlanta.

PAIGE WOOD

Paige Wood is an award-winning independent filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, and creative consultant who may or may not be the third Morgendorffer sister — only Black and with better glasses. Based in Detroit and working worldwide, Paige has produced a number of short documentary and narrative films that have gone on to gain critical acclaim, such as "Femme Queen Chronicles" (2018, dir: Ahya Simone), "Riding with Aunt D. Dot" (2018, dir: Bree Gant), "The Giverny Document" (2019, dir: Ja'Tovia Gary), “W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and The Divine” (2019, dir: Jeremiah Zagar) and "Showing Out/Showing Up" (2019: dir: Margot Bowman).

Most recently, Paige served as the Supervising Producer for an animated pilot (MINE), a video game (DOT’S HOME), a children’s book (ALEJANDRIA FIGHTS BACK!), and a podcast (BUT NEXT TIME) under the Rise-Home Stories Project, which aimed to shift dominant narratives and is supported by The Ford Foundation, JoLu Productions, and Working Films. In addition to her independent work, Paige teaches film producing at Wayne State University as an adjunct instructor, and also is working with leading documentary filmmakers as an impact consultant. Currently, Paige serves as the Supervising Producer for the Detroit Narrative Agency’s 2024-2025 Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship. In addition to her collaborative work, Paige is currently developing several projects for television, two features, and her directorial short film debut.

As a writer and creative, Paige loves to tell stories that subvert the idea of where fantasy, horror, and humor can exist by injecting a bit of absurdity into our current reality. Paige’s first love is animation, which heavily colors her artistic attitude to everything she does, whether writing a grounded, live-action rom-com or a wild, animated sci-fi opera. Furthermore, Paige’s approach to moving image and media-making is an ever-evolving framework shaped by working and learning in community with fellow BIPOC creatives, peoples of lived experience, and grassroots organizations to create transformational and engaging media.

Paige is a 2024 Fellow for Film Independent’s Episodic Lab, 2024 Finalist for the Fox Entertainment Writers Incubator, 2023 winner of Constellations' Artist Disruptor Award, 2022 Gotham TV Lab Fellow, 2021-2022 Annenberg Lab Civic Media Fellow, a 2020 Kresge Artist Fellow, an alumni of Firelight Media's 2018-2019 Impact Producer Cohort, as well as a 2019 fellow of the Sundance Institute | Knight Foundation Program for both an original urban fantasy feature script (currently in early development) and her work with ‘Femme Queen Chronicles’. Her short scripts “Heavy Flow” and “MORTAL (HOT COMB)AT” have also been a finalist or semi-finalist in a number of competitions.