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Ja’Tovia Gary


Ja’Tovia Gary (USA) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation, born in Dallas, Texas, in 1984. Gary’s multivalent works seek to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, applying what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving images. Her films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed, asserting instead Black spiritual technologies, ancestral legacies, and the complex interiority of Black life.

Gary received her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014). Her work has been exhibited at festivals and museums worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Austrian Film Museum, New Orleans Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Open City Documentary Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, winning awards from Locarno Film Festival and BlackStar Film Festival, as well as from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Block Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. Gary worked as a post-production and archival assistant for Spike Lee’s Bad 25 (2012), and as an assistant editor on Ken Burns’s documentary Jackie Robinson (2016). She has taught courses in direct animation and cameraless filmmaking at Mono no Aware in Brooklyn and was a founding member (2013) of New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers. Media City Film Festival presented a retrospective of her films at its 26th edition in 2023. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas.




An Ecstatic Experience, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, 16mm > digital, 6 min, 2015

An Ecstatic Experience is a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

I am simultaneously creating and destroying, remaking and unmaking. My intimate interaction with the archive ... expresses my desire to be a part of it, to make my presence felt in and on that history while also interrogating it.
–Ja’Tovia Gary

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.




The Giverny Document, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, S16mm > digital, 41 min, 2019

Filmed on location in Harlem, USA, and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. The filmmaker unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman-on-the-street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production. 

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.


These films are co-presented with Black Gold and Three Fold, Detroit. 

Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy of the artist © Ja’Tovia Gary.



View next: Jocelyne Saab, as part of Media City Film Festival 27th Edition: Spotlight Series



Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.