Writer-director MG Evangelista was born in Manila and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Evangelista received a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Film, joining a distinguished list of filmmakers whose past recipients include Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, Lee Isaac Chung, and Kelly Reichardt. Currently, an AFI DWW+ Directing Participant for the 2024-2025 year. 

 

Evangelista's debut feature film, Burning Well, currently in development, received the 2020 Tribeca All Access Grant, a 2021 WIF x Sundance Finance Intensive Fellowship, an ARRAY + Google production grant, and the 2024 SFFILM Rainin Grant. The feature is based on the short film Fran this Summer, an LGBTQ love story that won the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest and screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2022, the film participated in the Torino Feature Film Lab and the Film Fatales: Trans Stories Fellowship. 

 

Playing with cinematic language and subverting narrative tropes, Evangelista captures people and places with poetry and pop. Featured on Hulu, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in i-D Magazine, their body of work includes VR dramedy Water Melts, supported by Tribeca and Google, La Gloria, a Project Involve produced short, and an HBO Ibero-American Award Finalist and the documentary They Call Me Suki, about legendary AAPI activist Suki Terada Ports. 

 

A 2022 fellow for the DGA and AICP's Commercial Directors Diversity Program (CDDP), Evangelista has helmed commercial films for Jeep, Gucci, and The Asian American Foundation. They received their MFA in Directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and goes by the nickname Grace. ​