Andres 'Jay'' Molina (co-director) left the Dominican Republic in his late teens for New York's Lower East Side. In 2014, Jay developed a rare lung condition that attacked his vital organs and left him paralyzed. A former baseball player and truck driver, today Jay is nourishing a passion for filmmaking and animation, and advocating for people living with disabilities. His poetry and writings have been published in NYU's Literacy Review, The Wire, and Wheeling & Healing: A Poetry Anthology Edited by OPEN DOORS Reality Poets, and he's a recipient of the NYC Mayor's Office Safe In The City Grant. Fire Through Dry Grass is his first feature-length film. A NYT Critic's Pick, FIRE premiered at BlackStar in 2023, where it won the jury award for best feature documentary, and is broadcast + streaming on POV/PBS. Alexis Neophytides (co-director, producer) is a documentary filmmaker based in New York City. She is the co-creator, co-director and producer of Neighborhood Slice, a public television documentary series that tells the stories of longtime New Yorkers who've held onto their little corner of the city despite fast-growing gentrification. She produced and directed the series 9.99, for which she won a NY Emmy. Her first feature-length documentary, Dear Thirteen, explores coming of age in the modern world and premiered at DOC NYC in 2022. Her most recent film, Fire Through Dry Grass, co-directed with Andres 'Jay' Molina, documents Jay and his fellow Reality Poets' art and activism inside their nursing home during the COVID 19 pandemic. Over the past decade she has developed filmmaking programs, implemented curricula and taught students all around NYC. In 2019 Alexis was a visiting artist for OPEN DOORS, where she met the Reality Poets and began working with Jay. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.