The winners of the 2025 Sloan Student Prizes – Quinn Spicker of AFI for God Makers and Nora Kaye of Brooklyn College for The Head Cases – were celebrated at Museum of the Moving Image in New York on April 9. During the evening’s festive reception, the awards were presented to the winners by two of the jurors who selected them, filmmakers Eliza McNitt and Robert Kolodny. Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize honorable mention Ellie Melick was also recognized during the program for her script Sledhead. The event included remarks from MoMI Board of Trustees Co-Chair Ivan Lustig, Curator of Science and Technology Sonia Epstein, and Sloan Foundation VP and Program Director Doron Weber. After the awards presentation, audiences were treated to staged readings of excerpts from each winning script followed by a conversation where Spicker and Kaye spoke with journalist Evan Ratliff about the inspiration behind their scripts and the important topics in STEM they illuminate. In Spicker’s case, the focus of his script – the suppressed ethical concerns raised by Sam Altman’s unscrupulous practices at OpenAI – loomed especially large in the wake of Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s ‘Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?’ published in the New Yorker earlier in the week.
Below, read more about the winning projects and check out photos from the celebration.
The winner of the 2025 Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize:
GOD MAKERS by Quinn Spicker (AFI)
Logline: In this true story for the battle over ChatGPT, academic researcher Helen Toner takes on tech-industrialist Sam Altman in an attempt to control the future of AI.
Jury Citation: “Keenly constructed and propulsively written, God Makers tackles a pivotal moment in human history. In anchoring the script in the perspective of a woman in STEM, Quinn Spicker has crafted a fresh, nuanced take on the story audiences think they know about Sam Altman, ChatGPT, and the future of artificial intelligence. The jury is delighted to award the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize to GOD MAKERS.”
Honorable Mention for the 2025 Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize:
SLEDHEAD by Ellie Melick (Carnegie Mellon University)
Logline: When her cousin — and hero — loses a long battle with mental illness, U.S.A. Skeleton athlete Ingrid Anderson puts her Olympic dreams on the line to help neurological researchers investigate how sliding sports damage the brain.
The winner of the 2025 Sloan Student Discovery Prize:
THE HEAD CASES by Nora Kaye (Brooklyn College)
Logline: Two brilliant, stubborn women—a rebellious young scientist and her exacting former professor—must overcome their mutual hatred to save the professor’s fading mind, testing their unorthodox Alzheimer’s treatment in a high stakes experiment that blurs the line between genius and recklessness.
Jury citation: “Balancing relatable emotional stakes with laugh-out-loud humor, THE HEAD CASES’s distinctive tone and sparkling dialogue make it an engrossing read. Nora Kaye’s charming two-hander explores the personal motivations and ethical challenges faced by scientists who devote their careers to combatting devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s. The jury is pleased to award the Sloan Student Discovery Prize to THE HEAD CASES”
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Quinn Spicker and Nora Kaye. Photo Credit: Thanassi Karageorgiou.
Nora Kaye and guests at awards reception. Photo Credit: Thanassi Karageorgiou.
Quinn Spicker, Evan Ratliff and Nora Kaye. Photo Credit: Thanassi Karageorgiou.
A fully packed house applauds the cast performing an excerpt from God Makers. Photo Credit: Thanassi Karageorgiou.
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