At the 40th Sundance Film Festival, Being (the Digital Griot) – Rashaad Newsome’s non-binary AI – will read their poetry and lead a workshop to help participants decolonize their minds. Catch a glimpse here. Being will appear again as a major character in our forthcoming doc Get Your 10s.
Our feature doc-in-progress Get Your 10s secured major funding through ITVS, the primary funder of independent documentaries on public television – guaranteeing us a wide and enthusiastic audience, and putting us on track to finish the film in 2024.
Johnny was selected from among many incredible scholars at San Francisco State University to receive a Marcus Transformative Research Award. The award provides a one-semester sabbatical and $3000 to work on the forthcoming documentary Get Your 10s.
Our film @getyour10s was selected as a finalist for DocPitch, a prestigious grant that funds documentaries. Though we didn’t win, we got $5000 in production funds that moved us closer to completion! Big thanks to DocLands Film Festival and California Film Institute.
Build or Destroy, an animated experimental short that Johnny produced, screened in festivals including Outfest, Outfest Fusion, Choreoscope (Barcelona), Seattle Queer Film Festival and Newfest, where director Rashaad Newsome won the Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award. The film also screened at the In the Black Fantastic exhibition in London and …
After 6 intense weeks, we emerged from Rashaad Newsome’s mind-blowing exhibition and performance at NYC’s Park Avenue Armory with hundreds of hours of incredible footage. Featuring some of the top vogue dancers from around the world along with an opera singer, a spoken-word poet, global musicians, a gospel choir and …
PRAY AWAY premiered on Netflix in August, generating hundreds of reviews and press articles (such as the ones in Variety and The Guardian), and spearheading an engagement campaign to raise awareness about the dangers and human costs of conversion therapy.
Queer Cinema Project received more than $77,000 from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and the estate of Barbara Hammer, allowing QCP to continue to support LGBTQ+ student storytelling and the research, education, and promotion of queer filmmaking at SFSU’s School of Cinema.
YOU CAN’T TAKE, an international dance video collaboration with the Ballet National de Marseille, the collective (La)Horde, and Lasseindra Ninja, produced by Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons, premiered in Beaux Arts.
BLACK MAGIC, a new performance video celebrating Black queer resiliency and strength by Rashaad Newsome, premiered in January at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in NYC, followed by a screening at Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany. Johnny Symons was producer and DP.
