Isabella Grace Cohn is a 21-year-old student activist and the director and videographer of the documentary film Watch You Rise. She was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and is a recent graduate with a BFA from Goddard College and was accepted into the 2024 Telluride Student Symposium. Isabella is driven by studying and creating socially engaged films and media. Her work explores contradictions without resolution while refusing to minimize or exploit trauma. Her film, Watch You Rise, works to portray provocative content and difficult truths about gender, sex, transgenerational, and cultural issues with individuals who are typically excluded from public discourse. She is committed to engaging young adults in front of the camera and behind it, believing that young people can create significant changes in their lives and communities.

Isabella’s path toward creating Watch You Rise began seven years ago when she started the Me Too Teen Project. The website provides teens with a safe and healing space for reading and sharing stories of survival, reaching every continent and all 50 states. Her work associated with the Me Too Teen Project included significant fundraising for nonprofits working with sexual assault. Isabella has received local, state, and national attention from multiple news outlets and was recognized by the Boulder D.A. for her social activism in 2018-2019. She was invited to speak at the 2022 YWCA Reproductive March of nearly 3000 people. Over the past 4 years, she has shared her work on the film with the Boulder YWCA, 2022 YWCA Reproductive Rights March, SPANN (Safehouse Progressive Alliances), MESA (Moving to End Sexual Assault), the Boulder D.A. and the Restorative Justice program in 2023.

Watch You Rise documents Isabella’s cross-country journey to uncover the roots of sexual assault, through interviews with young adult and teen survivors, perpetrators, and experts to fill in gaps of current cultural, historical, and organizational limitations to understanding youth and young adult sexual assault. Isabella confronts personal trauma and challenges her mother’s silence about her childhood assault, exposing their family’s fragile relationship to the past. Her exploration reveals societal divisions, diverse perspectives, hope, and transformation through action and vulnerability. Interviews include Dr. Annie Farmer, a licensed psychologist and one of the first women to come forward as a youth survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and Giselle Maxwell, and Dr. James Gordon a psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of trauma recovery.

As rights to education around sexuality, sex, and sexual assault continue to be withheld, she aims to make Watch You Rise accessible and distributable so that it can reach communities across the country. If you would like to be part of the community of people supporting youth and young adults and support her work opening up the conversation around youth and young adult sexual assault, please visit her website at watchyourise.com for more information about the film and how to donate. Donations to Watch You Rise are tax deductible and the film is fiscally sponsored by From The Heart Productions.