Sky Sitney, the longtime festival programmer for AFI Docs, is stepping down from the festival.

In an email sent to screening committee members last week, Sitney said she would be bowing out of the festival, formerly known as Silverdocs, for this year’s iteration. Her last day as festival director is February 28th. Sitney started at the festival in 2006, which transformed from a small event in downtown Silver Spring to one of the country’s leading documentary festivals, bringing thousands of filmmakers, industry folks, and documentary film fans to the D.C. area each June. Over the years, Sitney has helped program some of the most notable documentaries of the past decade—including recent Oscar winners and nominees like The Cove, The Act of Killing, Man on Wire, An Inconvenient Truth, Restrepo, and others—and brought some of documentary film’s most revered filmmakers to the festival.

Last year, however, the festival underwent some major changes. The Discover Channel, one of the festival’s presenting sponsors, pulled out and the AFI rebranded it AFI Docs. But a change in name and sponsorship wasn’t the biggest change the festival underwent: Last year was the first time AFI Docs split its time between its home base in downtown Silver Spring and several venues in downtown Washington, D.C., including the theaters in the National Portrait Gallery, the Goethe Institute, the Newseum, and more.

“I just felt that I had given what I could to the event, and it was time for me to start exploring other things,” Sitney told the Post. “It felt like a natural time, having seen [the festival] go through that challenging adjustment, to kind of pave the way both for myself to shift into new gears and to create space for new leadership to come into the festival and take it into its next chapter.”

Sitney, who programmed the Newport International Film Festival and the New York Underground Film Festival prior to starting AFI Docs, will continue to serve as a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University’s film and media studies program, as well as continue her work as a documentary consultant for filmmakers and festivals alike.

“Sky is limitless in the gifts she has given both to American film and the American Film Institute,” AFI President Bob Gazzale said in a statement. “Her passion for the nonfiction art form has inspired us all to envision AFI Docs as the place where this nation’s leading artists and our nation’s leaders come together to better the world.”

This year’s AFI Docs is scheduled to take place June 18-22.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a member of the AFI Docs Screening Committee since 2013.