Ja'Tovia Gary

Gary was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, in a Pentecostal church community. Before becoming a filmmaker, Gary pursued a professional career in acting, but she soon became disheartened by the reductive roles and characters that she was offered in the film industry.[1] In Filmmaker magazine, Gary described this disillusionment as an impetus for her shift from acting to filmmaking: "I was getting debasing roles. In Grand Theft Auto IV, I was the voice of a drug dealer's battered girlfriend, and you as a player would opt to save me or not. I wanted control over my image."[2]

Gary's work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed, while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film, archival footage, and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways in which structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence.[3] Gary has also focused on themes such as black feminist subjectivity and has confronted the often painful history of these subjects by featuring archival footage in her work. In conversation with Michael B. Gillespie, a film theorist and historian at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Gary describes her process:

I am simultaneously creating and destroying, remaking and unmaking. My intimate interaction with the archive... expresses my desire to be a part of it, to make my presence felt in and on that history while also interrogating it.[4]

Gillespie notes that "Gary renders film blackness as cinema in the wake, an assemblage of work that poses new circuits and aesthetic accountings of blackness, sociality, and obliteration."[4]

In June 2013, Gary was among the founding members of the New Negress Film Society, a collective of black women filmmakers that seeks to create a community and raise awareness of black female voices and stories in the film industry.[5]

Gary earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. She also completed a Dual Bachelor of Arts in Documentary Film Production and Africana Studies at Brooklyn College. Gary also holds a Documentary Filmmaking Certificate from the LV Prasad Academy in Chennai, India.[6]

The artist's professional production credits include post-production and archival assistant for Spike Lee's Bad 25 and Shola Lynch's Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,[7] as well as assistant editor on Jackie Robinson, a two-part biographical documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, which premiered April 2016 on PBS.[8]

She has taught at The New School and Mono No Aware in New York City.[9]

Gary was a 2018–2019 Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center fellow at Harvard University.[10] She is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and by the Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris.[11]

Gary's work has been screened internationally at venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival,[12] the Edinburgh International Film Festival,[13] Frameline, the New Orleans Film Festival, Gdansk Animation Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Tampere Film Festival.[6] Gary's work has been exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen in New York City, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.[6]

In 2020, Los Angeles's Hammer Museum and the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York each presented Gary's experimental film The Giverny Document.[14]

Gary's work has earned her a Creative Capital award,[15] as well as support from DOC Society, the Jerome Foundation, and Sundance Institute. In 2016, Gary participated in the Terra Summer Residency program, in Giverny, France.[10]

In 2017, Gary was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking in Filmmaker Magazine.[2]

Gary's work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art,[16] Art, Design & Architecture Museum of UC Santa Barbara,[17] Studio Museum of Harlem, and, the Memorial Art Gallery.[18] Gary's work is part of The On February 26, 2018, the Whitney released a video by artist Shellyne Rodriguez where she responds and discusses Gary's film An Ecstatic Experience.[19]

• Official website
• Ja'Tovia Gary on IMDb
• New Negress Film Society
• Black Women Filmmakers