Visionary Justice StoryLab
Connecting stories to justice.
About
VISIONARY JUSTICE STORYLAB
Visionary Justice StoryLab (VJS) is a film hub and collective innovating at the intersection of story, culture, and media. We bring together writers, artists, media makers, and cultural workers to evolve narratives rooted in the imagination and liberation. Our work:
- Creation of new media drawing from and centering the lives and experiences of female identified, trans, and queer BIPOC (Black, Brown, and Indigenous People of Color)
- Organizing BIPOC writers’ rooms, and story-based gatherings that utilize art and media as a basis for dialogue and coalition building;
- The development of accompanying resources, such as toolkits and discussion guides to engage community dialog and organizing efforts through local screenings and partnerships.
At this critical moment when radical efforts towards criminal justice reform are taking root across the nation, we are centering narratives from those who are directly impacted while applying the lenses of gender and sexuality in the storytelling.
Our current work is focused on the development of a limited episodic series which centers female identified people of color who have been impacted by incarceration and systemic racism. The series will challenge dominant narratives and representations in popular culture while exploring the ways female identified folks are employing their own agency and imagination in resistance to these systems.
The series will explore through character and relationship the ways in which incarceration and systemic racism function in our respective communities and how we can work to build solidarity and strong ally-ship with one another. In connecting the stories of queer BIPOC communities to the larger systemic narrative of criminal justice, our aim is to center their lives and bear witness to the ways in which they have historically resisted erasure and invisibility.
Media is a tool for healing as it creates new ways of seeing. As our current political climate moves swiftly in its disenfranchisement of people of color, of immigrants, of women, of LGBTQ communities, never have we felt a more urgent need for stories that demonstrate our interdependence in getting free to build a world in which we can truly live.
Learn More: http://www.visionaryjusticestorylab.org