Shawn Guthrie oversees the Student Academy Awards program and the Grants program for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  His career at the Academy began 15 years ago in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting program, a position to which he brought many years of experience in screenwriting and screenwriting competitions.  For the last ten years he’s run the Academy’s Grants Department where he’s overseen the distribution of over $8,500,000 in grants to film festivals, educational programs, internship programs and film scholars. Three years ago he took over leadership of the Student Academy Awards which annually acknowledges the best student filmmakers from around the world.  He took the awards online and oversaw the largest expansion in the program’s history as entries more than tripled from his first year at the helm.  The first job he ever loved was working for the Austin Film Festival while still in college at the University of Texas.