maori karmael holmes
Keynote Speaker
Maori is a curator, filmmaker and cultural worker. She is the founder of BlackStar Film Festival and currently serves as co-curator (with Kahlil Joseph) of the Purple Garden Cinema Series at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She has organized programs in film and performance at a myriad of organizations including: Anthology Film Archives, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Barnes Foundation, Asian Arts Initiative, Painted Bride Art Center, Scribe Video Center, Lightbox Film Center, and Swarthmore College. Other projects include KinoWatt (2011-2012), co-curated with Sara Zia Ebrahimi, and Black Lily Film & Music Festival for Women (2006-2010).
As a filmmaker, her film and video works have screened internationally including most notably, her feature documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop. Maori was a fellow at the 60th Flaherty Film Seminar (2014) and a 2016 Ford Foundation Rockwood JustFilms Fellow.
She received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University, her BA in History from American University, and did postgraduate studies in Design at California Institute of the Arts. She has taught at Drexel University, University of the Arts, Temple University, and Villanova University. Previous professional positions include Institute of Contemporary Art, Leeway Foundation, Coolhunter Management, Washington City Paper, and Sony Music. Her writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, Philadelphia City Paper, Philadelphia Weekly, Washington City Paper, BlackAmericaWeb.com, Blu Magazine, and Alternet.org. She began her career with internships at the National Museum of American History and Dallas Austin’s Rowdy Records.
CALL HER GANDA
A documentary film by PJ Raval
A modern David and Goliath story, Call Her Ganda follows a cast of willful women as they take on some of the most powerful institutions in the world following the tragic murder of Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transwoman, by a U.S. Marine. All intimately invested in the case, these three women--activist attorney (Virgie Suarez), transpinay journalist (Meredith Talusan) and Jennifer’s mother (Julita "Nanay" Laude)--galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of U.S. imperialism and transmisogyny.
A Guggenheim and Sundance grant recipient, Call Her Ganda premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and has screened at numerous film festivals nationally and internationally, including Hot Docs in Toronto and the Cinemalaya in the Philippines.
To-date, it has won two "Best Documentary" awards (Toronto's Inside/Out and LA's Asian Pacific Film Festival).
Call Her Ganda will have a limited theatrical release in the Fall of 2018.
panel discussion
PJ raval &
curran nault
Following the screening of Call Her Ganda, director PJ Raval and co-producer Curran Nault will bring their collective artistic and academic acumen to bear, addressing practical and philosophic dimensions of the text, including its grassroots production histories, social justice impact campaign, and apparitional agitational aesthetics.
Q+A and reception to follow.
Director PJ Raval is an award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer whose work explores overlooked subcultures and identities within the already marginalized LGBTQ+ community. Named one of Out Magazine's "Out 100" and FILMMAKER Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film," in addition to Call Her Ganda, PJ’s film credits include Trinidad (Showtime, LOGO) and Before You Know It, which follows the lives of three gay senior men, described by indieWIRE as "a crucial new addition to the LGBT doc canon." Before You Know It screened theatrically and broadcast premiered as the season finale of America Reframed on PBS, and was recently awarded the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association Excellence in Documentary Award 2016. Also an accomplished cinematographer, PJ shot the Academy Award-nominated Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water. PJ is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, 2016 Firelight Media Fellow, and a 2017 Robert Giard Fellow.
​
Co-producer Curran Nault is the author of Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture (Routledge, 2018). He holds a PhD in Radio-Television-Film (RTF) from the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a joint lecturer in RTF, Asian American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Curran has published numerous scholarly essays, including a forthcoming piece on Call Her Ganda, in such journals as Jump Cut, Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Film and Video, as well as the anthologies Queer Love in Film and Television, Mediated Girlhoods and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema and Oxford Handbook of Punk. In addition, Curran is the Founder and Artistic Director of the queer transmedia arts festival, OUTsider (2018 Austin Critics Table nominee for "Best Independent Art Project"), a member of the governing Board of Fantastic Fest, and a documentary producer: Before You Know It (Raval, 2013) and Call Her Ganda (Raval, 2018).
​
PLENARY PANEL
A Discussion on the Ethics of Community Media Making & Activist Research
Carla Carter-Bishop
Carla LynDale Carter-Bishop is a Lecturer in UNT's Department of Media Arts. In Philadelphia, she served as Video Facilitator at Scribe Video Center teaching various community groups how to make documentaries that promote social change.
​
In 2013, she started the organization Focused.Arts.Media.Education.(FAMe), which engages youth in documentary filmmaking to create media that matters in their communities. She has a sincere passion to use her filmmaking and technology expertise to excite, engage, and promote self-expression in youth.
​
Carter-Bishop has enjoys producing documentaries that engage whole communities. Her recent project Freedman Town 2.0 is an interactive, augmented reality exhibition that gives visitors unique insights into Denton’s African-American history and community.
​
She received her BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Chicago and her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia.
Suzanne Enck
Suzanne Enck is an Associate Professor of feminist rhetoric and public culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas where she is also allied faculty with the Women’s & Gender Studies Program.
A committed feminist-activist, Dr. Enck has worked actively with local gender violence prevention programs for over 20 years and has volunteered with the Dallas-based educational and empowerment program for incarcerated women, Resolana. With the support of a 2011 research grant from the Organization for Research on Women and Communication, she conducted 36 life history interviews with incarcerated women.
She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Storying Carceral Survival: Exploring Women's Pathways to Incarceration. For her work at the nexus of gender violence and activism, she earned NCA’s Critical & Cultural Studies Division’s 2016 Outstanding Scholar-Activist award.
Liv Williams
Liv is a communications specialist and filmmaker who worked for the BBC as a member of teams who won BAFTA, Digital Emmy and Wincott awards. In recent years, she has been working for international NGOs and alongside military personnel in areas of the world which have been affected by natural and conflict-driven disasters.
From refugee camps in the Middle East, flood-affected countries in Africa and earthquake-torn areas in Asia, Liv’s experiences have given her particular insights whilst working in remote and sometimes hostile regions of the world. In capturing evidence of 'on the ground' realities, documenting struggle and individual narratives, Liv was alerted to many of the ethical questions surrounding such realities which have fed much of her subsequent work.
​
Liv is also a keen athlete and published her first book Chasing the Elements: The Heart and Soul of Action Sports in 2016 after the popularity of her blog iLivExtreme.com caught a publisher’s attention. In her online work.
​
Liv received her undergraduate degree in French and Italian from the University of Wales Swansea, an MA in Television Production from Falmouth University and is currently a PhD student in the School of Communication at American University in Washington D.C, where her dissertation topic explores role of ethics within the humanitarian, military and technological spheres.
Maori Karmael Holmes
Maori is a curator, filmmaker and cultural worker. She is the founder of BlackStar Film Festival and currently serves as co-curator (with Kahlil Joseph) of the Purple Garden Cinema Series at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She has organized programs in film and performance at a myriad of organizations including: Anthology Film Archives, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Barnes Foundation, Asian Arts Initiative, Painted Bride Art Center, Scribe Video Center, Lightbox Film Center, and Swarthmore College. Other projects include KinoWatt (2011-2012), co-curated with Sara Zia Ebrahimi, and Black Lily Film & Music Festival for Women (2006-2010).
​
As a filmmaker, her film and video works have screened internationally including most notably, her feature documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop. Maori was a fellow at the 60th Flaherty Film Seminar (2014) and a 2016 Ford Foundation Rockwood JustFilms Fellow.
​