Firelight Media's Beyond Resilience series co-presented the panel discussion "Black on the Internet" at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia on Friday, August 2, 2024.

The discussion explored the relationship between Black folks and the digital world; how the Black community — particularly Black women and nonbinary people — use the internet as a vital resource for seeking support and advocating for social justice, while also addressing the significant safety and privacy concerns that arise. We unpacked the dual-edged nature of the internet, highlighting it as a tool but also revealing the vulnerabilities and threats that Black people specifically face.

Panelists included William Greaves Research & Development Fund grantee Chica Andrade, Jazmin Jones, Kimberly Drew, and Neema Githere Siphon. The conversation was moderated by Sarah Jackson.

Accessibility Notice: This event included live ASL interpretation; closed captioning in available in the recording.

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The Beyond Resilience Series is sponsored by Open Society Foundations. Beyond Resilience is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Field of Vision.

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Participant Bios:

Chica Andrade (she/her) is a Brazilian travesti director, screenwriter, and consultant for audiovisual projects. She served on the board of the Trans Professionals Association in Audiovisual until 2023 and participated in the American Film Showcase at USC. Her career highlights include co-directing “Segura Essa Pose” on GloboPlay and directing “Retrato Íntimo.” She is the creator of the feature film House Of Hilton, awarded by Firelight Media's William Greaves Research & Development Fund. Chica won the 1st Black Narratives Pitching Prize and the Rede Paradiso Prize at Diáspora Lab. She also attended Berlinale Talents and Filma Afro Lab in Colombia as a screenwriter.

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Jazmin Jones (she/her/they/them) is a Brooklyn-based, Bay Area raised visual storyteller, archivist, and organizer. Her aim is to create platforms for more vibrant and nuanced representation of the marginalized communities she’s a part of. Working across visual mediums, her projects often echo personal experiences as a queer, nonbinary Black femme waging intimacy in the Post-Internet era. In 2021, Filmmaker Magazine listed Jazmin as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She’s been in fellowship with organizations like Sundance, The Flaherty, and Eyebeam and her work has been written about in publications like The New York Times, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and Vice. In 2015, Jazmin co-founded BUFU:By Us For Us; a project-based collective interested in solidarity amongst “Us”, co-creating experimental models of organizing with “You”. In the span of five years, the collective facilitated 400+ free events centering QTPOC both IRL and online, and was named Best Art Collective Promoting P.O.C. Solidarity by the Village Voice. Jazmin’s current feature length hybrid documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is in co-production with Neon. When she isn’t investigating the disappearance of Mavis Beacon with Olivia McKayla Ross, she unwinds by archiving Black delight on instagram @allBlackASMR.

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Neema Githere Siphone (they/them) (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, artist, and guerrilla theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age, Githere’s work prototypes relationality-as-art through experiments that span community organizing, social design, travel and image-making. Githere is a 2023-24 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, where they are working on a project entitled “Data Healing: A Call for Repair”.

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Sarah J. Jackson (she/her) (Moderator) is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by Black and feminism activists. In 2020 she published #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice a collaborative book on the peak years of Twitter activist networks. Jackson is currently writing a book on African American mediamakers for Mariner/HarperCollins.