Profiling a Champion
JOSALYNN JADE SMITH’S WORK AND INTENT AS A TOP EMERGING FILMMAKER
By Robert Delaney
Josalynn Jade Smith Takes On The World
Josalynn Jade Smith is a screenwriter, director, and filmmaker whose work has screened at numerous film festivals, including the St. Louis International Film Festival, the Inside Out Toronto Film Festival, the Bentonville Film Festival, the Twin Cities Black Film Festival, the Williamsburg Independent Film Festival, the San Diego Black Film Festival and the Queer Fest St. Louis. They are a graduate of Columbia University’s Film MFA program, a recipient of the Jesse Thompkins III Screenwriting Award, a SFFILM 2019 Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellow, and a Sloan Foundation Production Grant recipient for their thesis short film, SOMETHING IN THE WATER. Josalynn was also an artist in residence at the Catwalk Institute.
Most recently, Josalynn was a recipient of the 2021 Sundance Uprise Grant for a new project about the life of Civil Rights activist Pauli Murray. They originally learned about Pauli Murray from a New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz, “It wasn’t leaving out any details about her struggles with mental health or her queerness, in addition to all of her achievements within Civil Rights and Women’s Rights.”
Josalynn’s script deals with the complexities of Pauli Murray’s storied legacy: “I think why not a lot of people have heard of her, or why she’s taken a step back from being a major Civil Rights and Women Rights figure, is because of those struggles she had. They were fully external. I don’t think she would have had the mental health issues if she was able to be accepted for her queerness. But that just wasn’t possible in that time period. People would know that her thesis at Howard was the foundation of Brown vs Board of Education, or that she was one of the founders of NOW [National Organization for Women]. The story is an origin story for Pauli Murray, and predates all of that success professionally. It’s a moment of dealing with the ghosts of the past.”
Joslaynn’s short film RIDE OR DIE was Stowe’s March Spotlight Film of the Month on our Alumni Curated Short Film Vimeo Channel. “I love a good two-hander movie. I like to pretty much stay with the protagonist, maybe two protagonists, for the whole movie. I think that’s probably why I picked this moment for the Pauli Murray project and also for RIDE OR DIE. It’s about two people who need to stay in the present and they are using each other to stay in the present. The future and the past are two monsters for them.” Josalynn is currently based in Los Angeles, but RIDE OR DIE highlights their roots in St. Louis. “You feel like you can get a lot of different landscapes in a place like Georgia, and there are those same possibilities in a place like Missouri. You have any landscape you want in less than an hour radius from St. Louis City. I would really like to continue to highlight the specific St. Louis metro culture.”
In 2019, Josalynn was a finalist for our SAGIndie Fellowship for their feature length version of RIDE OR DIE, and we loved having them with us. “It was a really great experience. I feel like it was probably the most smoothly run Zoom event I’ve ever seen. I really commend you guys on that. It felt real. It was so well done and I really appreciate that. I had fun getting feedback from not only my group but the mentors. I felt like my work was really championed.”
We are thrilled to champion Josalynn’s numerous exciting projects, and are happy they are an active member of our ever growing alumni community.
Robert Delany is an Academic Intern with Stowe Story Labs. He graduated in 2020 with an MA in cinema studies from NYU and was a Program Associate for the 2020 Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, where he now conducts interviews for their “Filmmaker Spotlight Series”. Robert also writes for Split Tooth Media, an independent film and music publication based in Portland, Oregon. He is currently acting as a researcher on the film ASCO: WITHOUT PERMISSION, directed by Travis Gutierrez Senger and produced by North of Now. He was also an Office Assistant at Senger’s production company, Asa Nisi Masa Films, where he focused on the development of numerous projects. Robert graduated in 2018 with a BS in film and TV from Boston University’s School of Communication. Robert Delany was selected for this academic internship to focus on interviews and other writing for The Story Board, Stowe Story Labs’ bi-monthly newsletter. He will also assist in the establishment of a curated short film platform for Stowe Alumni.
