Saelyx Finna (she/they; formerly known as Courtney Sheehan) grew up in the middle of five kids in a village in rural Ohio. A fascination with dreaming and cinema offered escape routes for their imagination in the monocultural corn fields. Saelyx earned a degree in Visual Culture at Grinnell College, where they whetted their appetite for film programming by running the college movie theater.

Upon graduating, Saelyx was one of 40 national fellows awarded a Watson Fellowship, and embarked on a self-designed international research project. For their project, “The Politics of Film Festivals,” Saelyx worked with 20 festivals and film centers in Spain, the Netherlands, India, Brazil, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia. During the fellowship they co-founded Cine Migratorio, a migration-themed film festival in Santander, Spain.

As a journalist, Saelyx has covered film events ranging from the world’s largest documentary festival (IDFA in Amsterdam) to South America’s largest animation festival (Anima Mundi in Rio de Janeiro).

In 2013, Saelyx returned to the site of their first college internship, Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in Seattle, to become the Program Director. Saelyx served for five years as the Artistic and Executive Director of NWFF, the most comprehensive nonprofit film center in the Pacific Northwest. While at the Forum, Saelyx led the 23-year-old organization to an unprecedented state of financial health and public engagement.

Saelyx was named one of the “50 Most Influential Women in Seattle” by Seattle Met Magazine in 2018, recognized with the City of Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award for Arts & Innovation in 2017, and selected as one of ten “Artists of the Year” by City Arts Magazine in 2015. They are a member of the Guild of Future Architects.

After five years at NWFF, Saelyx moved to Los Angeles and opened Context Moves, a consultancy specializing in film distribution and strategic communications. Saelyx also rekindled their long-standing interest in dream neuroscience, and began developing a feature film about the emergence of dream tech: technology that directly interacts with the dreaming mind.