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Munroe credits Fusion, Los Angeles’s LGBT people of color film festival, as a recent festival she is proud of being included in. And she cites the Oakland International Black LGBT Film Festival as the one she most enjoyed participating in: “There were couches and they served you pizza—it was just hot! A practically all-black audience, a mixture of women and men. It was just super fun.”

Munroe has plans to make a feature film, with the working title Michael and Alice, centering around Alice (Ross) and her friendship with a gay man.

Munroe also works to help aspiring filmmakers by teaching a class at USC for the Innercity Filmmaker Group for kids who otherwise would not have the opportunity to produce short films, and she's a mentor for GLASS (Gay & Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) and a master of reiki.

As a Sundance programmer, Munroe is in a position to ensure strong representation of lesbians and of people of color in Sundance as well as all the other festivals that take their cue from it. Her opinions influence the range of shorts that wind up at queer film festivals throughout North America, as well as a wide array of festivals around the globe.

Between August and November of this year Munroe and fellow shorts programmers sifted through 4,337 submissions to select the 73 that will be screened at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. She also sees hundreds of additional shorts at festivals she attends throughout the year. With all this film viewing under her belt, Munroe says what she really wants to see is “the film about two lesbians who can’t decide on a couch at Ikea. I want to see stories about people that have nothing to do with them being gay but they just are gay.”

Long before joining the ranks at Sundance, Munroe began her film festival career in Toronto as co-director at The Inside/Out Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. She then moved on to Viacom Canada and The Toronto International Film Festival. In 1999 she became the administrative manager for The New Festival and programmed the “No Borders” section of the IFP market in New York. She has worked as a festival manager for Outfest, the Los Angeles Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and a programmer for the Los Angeles Film Festival. She has also been on several panels and film juries, in Canada, the U.S. and Brazil.

Munroe urges filmmakers to think outside the box: “I’ve seen maybe ten films this year by black boy writer/directors about black men being on the down-low. And they’re not. We all know about it now.” She adds that if you’re going to tell a story that we already now, it had better be a very good telling.

She also stresses the importance of getting out there and seeing what films other people are making, because “working in a vacuum is only going to leave you with rejection letters.”

Munroe draws on her extensive experience and knowledge as the basis for her forthcoming book, An Insider’s Guide To Short Filmmaking. The book will cover what programmers and agents are looking for, “what kind of film makes it out there and why you shouldn’t care--why you should just make the film you want to make.”

Just one more reason to keep an eye on this talented woman in the future.