Holly Herrick

Holly Herrick is Head of Film and Creative Media at the Austin Film Society (AFS), where she has played a key leadership role in the expansion of AFS’s film exhibition and filmmaker support programs since 2012, including overseeing over $1M in grant funds for Texas-based independent filmmakers. In 2013, AFS began the Artist Intensive, a narrative feature development program for Texas-based artists that helped to launch the first features of Annie Silverstein (Bull, Cannes 2019), Channing Godfrey Peoples (Miss Juneteenth, Sundance 2020), and Augustine Frizzell (Never Goin’ Back, Sundance 2019), among others. In 2015, AFS opened Austin Public, a community media center where studios, filmmaking equipment and training classes are made accessible to the public. In 2017, AFS opened the AFS Cinema, Austin’s only non-profit repertory and first run art house cinema, now an essential destination for cinephiles in the region and often recognized as one of the country’s leading art houses. She has led the program for the Texas Film Awards since 2013; Carol Burnett, Robin Wright, Erykah Badu, Tye Sheridan, Jesse Plemons, and Jonathan Majors are among those inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame during this period. On behalf of AFS, Herrick has contributed as a co-programmer for several international series dedicated to AFS’s unique history, including retrospectives at the 2018 Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (as part of their 2019 Richard Linklater exhibit), and a special section of the Premiers Plans Festival in Angers, France. Herrick got her start at the Sarasota Film Festival in Sarasota, Florida, where she served for six years as Programmer and then Director of Programming. She went on to be Programmer and Deputy Programs Director at the Hamptons International Film Festival in New York from 2008-2012. She has served on the producing team of several independent films, including selections of Sundance and SXSW.