ElevenLabs partners with MACRO and a16z Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) to support the next generation of storytellers

The Epigraph Creator Fellowship

The Epigraph is an eight-week fellowship built by MACRO and Andreessen Horowitz's Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF)- Silicon Valley's first venture capital fund consisting exclusively of Black cultural leaders and organizations committed to Black wealth generation. ElevenLabs is joining as a Core Lab Partner, providing voice, audio, and creative infrastructure across the full program to support seven professional storytellers as they develop market-ready narrative projects.

What the fellowship includes

The program combines virtual sessions, in-person working groups, and a final showcase at the Summer House Creator Summit Exhibition in Los Angeles in July 2026.

Fellows will work directly with ElevenLabs and other tools from select a16z portfolio companies, participate in hands-on sessions designed for applied experimentation, and receive guidance from MACRO creatives.

MACRO's projects have earned fifteen Academy Award nominations and three wins across a slate that includes Fences, Judas and the Black Messiah, Just Mercy, Mudbound, Sorry to Bother You, and Harriet. MACRO's verticals span film and television production, talent management, and a creative agency - making it one of the most significant independent media companies focused on stories from and about people of color.

How fellows will work with ElevenLabs

We're embedded across the full program lifecycle as the Voice and Global Storytelling Infrastructure Partner. Fellows will get hands-on access to ElevenLabs tools across four core areas of the creative process.

Give every character a voice before casting a single actor

Building a character often starts with finding its voice. With Voice Design, a fellow writing a period drama set in 1960s Lagos can generate a voice from a text prompt - specifying age, accent, tone, and pacing - and hear their protagonist speak in seconds. For projects that require a specific vocal performance, Voice Cloning lets creators build a high-fidelity replica from audio samples. With a library of over 10,000 community voices and support for 70-plus languages, fellows can cast voices for any character, in any language, without a recording session.

Our Text to Speech models are contextually and emotionally aware. They respond to cues in the script and adjust delivery accordingly - a whispered confession sounds different from a courtroom monologue. This means dialogue carries the weight of a real performance, with control over emotion, pacing, and style built directly into the generation process.

Hear your story before you shoot a single frame

Before a single day of production, fellows can use Studio to produce full audio drafts of their projects. A filmmaker developing a feature can assign different voices to different characters, generate complete scenes from a script, and listen back to test whether a five-minute dialogue scene drags or whether a cold open lands.

Reach global audiences without losing the original performance

Stories built for global audiences need to sound native in every language. Our Dubbing Studio translates audio and video across 32 languages while preserving each speaker's voice, tone, and timing. A documentary fellow could dub their interview subjects into Spanish, French, and Mandarin - each version retaining the speaker's vocal identity. Fellows can manually edit transcripts and translations, adjust voice settings, and regenerate individual segments until the output meets their standard.

Score your project from a text prompt

Fellows can use Eleven Music to generate original scores and soundtracks from text descriptions. A fellow scoring a short film can describe "tense, sparse cello over distant thunder" and receive a studio-grade track at 44.1kHz. For video projects, our video-to-music tool analyzes visual cues like motion and color to compose music that matches the tone of the footage. Tracks can be edited section by section, with control over lyrics, duration, and arrangement. Eleven Music is cleared for commercial use across film, television, podcasts, and advertising on Enterprise plans.

Why this matters

Storytelling is shifting as new tools reshape how ideas are developed, visualized, and shared. Infrastructure determines who benefits from that shift. The creators who gain early access to these resources are the ones who shape the direction of culture. The Epigraph Creator Fellowship exists to ensure that culturally grounded creators are equipped with the tools and support to lead.

With its success, it can become a repeatable framework for embedding AI infrastructure responsibly in creative industries - with creators at the center.