The 2026 Podcast Selections
Podcasts are competing at the Bushwick Film Festival for the first time. Press play on this year's selections, meet the people behind the mic, and choose the Audience Favorite.
New in 2026: audio storytelling gets its own spotlight.
For its 19th edition, Bushwick Film Festival added podcasts and animation as competitive categories, with dedicated juries for each, alongside the festival's documentary, narrative and episodic program.
These shows aren't being presented live this year, so this page is the stage. Each creator chose one episode that best represents their work. Listen, read about who made it, then vote for the one that stuck with you.
The Reality Shaper: A Musical Podcast
A D&D-inspired fantasy musical with epic adventure, moral stakes, and a queer enemies-to-lovers arc.
When lawful guardsman Boris Dragonheart discovers something dark beneath the surface of his seemingly idyllic city, he's forced to team up with the very robber he was supposed to arrest.
An award-winning musical theatre writer and performer whose work centers queer and disabled joy. Sair has been featured in the New York Times, and Broadway World called their writing “laugh-out-loud.” They won the 48th Annual Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival and were selected for the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Writers Workshop, the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, the Johnny Mercer Writer’s Grove, and the Prospect Musical Theatre Lab (twice).
abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast
An urban explorer turns abandoned places into fantastical audio adventures through the underbelly of American history.
Immersive audio fantasies recreate host Blake Pfeil’s explorations of abandoned spaces across the US and around the world, asking hard questions about history, community, economics, the environment and mental health, and inviting listeners to use imagination as a tool for healing.
An Ambie Award-winning multidisciplinary artist and creator of “All-American Ruins,” a genre-bending multimedia travelog featured in festivals, installations and performances in 13 countries and 17 states. Its podcast arm, “abandoned,” hit #1 on Apple Podcasts’ Places and Travel chart in 2025 (for three whole days). Blake works at TMI Project and co-hosts “Cinema Kingston!” on WKNY.
We’re Alive: Descendants
Eighteen years after the Outbreak, the children of the original survivors confront a changing world and the terrifying legacy they inherited.
A new generation has grown up behind the walls of civilization, carrying the names, scars and unfinished battles of those who came before. When new threats shatter their fragile security, they're pulled into a struggle that reveals how the infected have evolved, and how far humanity will go to survive.
An award-winning writer, producer, director and sound designer, and a US Army veteran, Kc teaches at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. He created the hit audio series We’re Alive, with hundreds of millions of downloads, and has produced immersive audio with Audible, iHeartRadio, Disney and Fox, earning nominations from the NAACP Image Awards, BBC Audio Drama Awards and the Audie Awards.
Cast
your
vote.
One vote per listener. Voting closes October 11.