Film Forum

ARTNOIR is a female-majority and black + brown owned, NYC based global collective and 501(c)(3) with a mission to celebrate and highlight the work of creatives of color while catalyzing cultural equity across the arts and culture industries. ARTNOIR seeks to empower artists, enthusiasts, curators, forward thinking organizations, storytellers, designers and patrons, to explore alternative perspectives to the traditional arts narrative, while leveraging the intersectionality of art and culture to develop new access points for discussion, exploration and collaboration.

Michèle Stephenson – Director and Producer
Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots and experience as a social justice lawyer to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces. She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that center the lived experiences of communities of color in the Americas and the Black diaspora. Grounded in a Black Atlantic lens, Stephenson tells stories that intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systemic oppression. She draws on fiction, immersive and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives. Her feature documentary, AMERICAN PROMISE, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. Her work STATELESS was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Most recently, Stephenson collaborated as co-director on the magical realist virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror, THE CHANGING SAME, which was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival. Along with her writing partners, Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book, Promises Kept. Currently, Stephenson is in post-production on a feature on the death of Freddie Gray, an ESPN story on Black girls’ hand-games, and a program for the CBC on the Black Power movement in Canada. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist awardee.

 
Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO and PBS. Her most recent film THE REBELLIOUS LIFE OF MRS. ROSA PARKS (Peacock) was honored by the Television Academy and won a Peabody Award and a Gracie Award.  It is currently streaming on Peacock.  Other recent work include the Emmy-nominated films  AMERICAN RECKONING (Frontline),  HOW IT FEELS TO BE FREE (American Masters), THE SIT IN: HARRY BELAFONTE HOSTS THE TONIGHT SHOW (Peacock) and GREEN BOOK: GUIDE TO FREEDOM (Smithsonian Channel).  Her film, THE KILLING OF BREONNA TAYLOR (HULU) won an NAACP Image Award and her previous films, THE NEW BLACK (a Film Forum premiere) and PROMISED LAND won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and P.O.V.  Yoruba   is a past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access. She was awarded the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award. Yoruba is the founding director of the documentary program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

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