MEET TABITHA JACKSON
“I love being engaged with meaning-making, and I experience being allowed into the delicate and vulnerable creative process of another person as a great privilege.”
Tabitha Jackson, courtesy of the artist
Tabitha Jackson has spent the last 30 years supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful cinema, and furthering the mission of uplifting a more expansive set of makers, audiences, and forms. Most recently as the first woman and person of color to be appointed Director of Sundance Film Festival, she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions. They ‘expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for’. Between 2013 and 2020 she headed the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program rethinking traditional project support in favor of more artist-centered models, and advocating for institutional support of formal innovation in nonfiction cinema. Tabitha is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is currently a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Work
mentor profile
Queer|Art|Mentorship will be accepting applications from emerging artists across the country. Are you open to working with someone remotely, or would you prefer they are based in the same city as you?
“Either is fine.”
What interests you about mentoring?
“I love being engaged with meaning-making, and I experience being allowed into the delicate and vulnerable creative process of another person as a great privilege. A relationship in which we can grapple with ideas and the cinematic language to express them from a place of honesty, curiosity, and 'what if-ness’ is part of my continuing eduction in being human.”
As a mentor, what would you like to offer an emerging artist? What would you like to receive?
“I would like to offer an emerging artist a listening empathetic ear (this work is HARD), an ability to grapple with ideas and the messy profound act of creative expression, and whatever experience I have picked up 3 decades of working as a black woman in arts and media in the US and UK.”
Is there anything else you’d like prospective applicants to know?
“I am way more interested in thinking and talking about ideas and voice and expression, than about the business and the state of the industry.”