New date! We Are Irreplaceable: A Night of Film & Poetry by Emerging Artists of Color

Presented by the Tisch Graduate Film Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Community-Building. Sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Join us for an evening of cinema and poetry from the Asian, Caribbean, and African diasporas. The program will begin with poetry from Giselle Buchanan, Jess X. Snow, Rami Karim, and Terrance Daye, and continue with a screening of short films by current Tisch Graduate Film students of color: Sontenish Myers, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Jess X. Snow, and Terrance Daye. We’ll end with a discussion about how film and poetry can open a portal to a world in which communities of color are seen, held, and healed. 

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Giselle Buchanan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and writer from the Bronx.  As an artist deeply involved in her community, she has worked extensively with women, incarcerated men on Rikers Island, and children in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Additionally, she has worked for various organizations, including the Bronx Museum, Harlem Textile Works, and New York Writers Coalition, facilitating workshops and assisting in programs designed to empower the creative and intellectual spirits of students from often underserved communities. She has performed in many places, from bookstores to ballrooms, including the Hammerstein Ballroom, the Apollo Theater, the Chicago Theater, Housing Works Bookstore, and Bluestockings. She currently resides in Brooklyn.

Terrance Daye is an award winning poet and filmmaker from Long Island. Daye’s creative work reimagines traditional representations of black masculinity and male identity and invests strongly in destgimitizing mental illness within the black community. In 2017, Daye was the recipient of a College Language Association Margaret Walker Prize for creative writing and selected as an Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Poetry winner by competition judge, Claudia Rankine. Daye received his BA from Morehouse College and is pursuing his MFA in filmmaking at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan was born in Tirupati, India, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was trained as an experimental/documentary filmmaker at Duke University, where he was named Filmmaker of the Year in his graduating year, before going on to work as a filmmaker at The Nation, Mother Jones, and The New York Times. He is currently an MFA candidate at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.

Rami Karim is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn. Their work has appeared in Apogee, The Brooklyn Review, and Tagvverk, among others publications, and their chapbook is Smile & Nod (Wendy’s Subway, 2018).

Sontenish Myers is a Caribbean American writer-director based in Harlem, and a third year in the NYU Grad Film program. Her most recent short film, Cross My Heart, follows an American teen who upon visiting her family in Jamaica, discovers a secret that changes the way she sees the people she loves. Myers was recently awarded as a “30 Under 30 Caribbean American Emerging Leader” by the Institute of Caribbean Studies, and is a 2017 Martin Scorsese Scholarship recipient.  

Jess X. Snow is a queer migrant Asian American artist and poet based in New York City currently studying directing in the MFA program for film at the NYU Tisch School of The Arts. As a result of the rootlessness that marked her childhood, she developed a severe stutter which she overcame through her discovery of visual and written language. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the anthologies: Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry, Nepantla, and has taken her to stages such as the US Institute for Peace, and universities and backyards nationwide.

Image: Still from Sontenish Myers’s Cross My Heart.