SEEKING MAVIS BEACON
ABOUT THE FILM
One of the most influential Black women in technology is a figment of our collective imagination. Mavis Beacon was invented by the Co-Founder of Myspace to sell the world’s most popular typing software, but the real woman she was modeled after disappeared in 1995.
Seeking Mavis Beacon poses critical questions regarding anthropomorphization and the consumption of marginalized bodies in the tech industry, while reimagining the legacy of a missing historical figure.
MEET THE INVESTIGATORS
Lead Investigator / Director
Jazmin Jones is a Brooklyn-based, Bay Area raised visual storyteller and thot leader with BUFU: By Us For Us. Her aim is to build 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, Black femme waging intimacy in the Post-Internet era.
Jazmin Jones is a Brooklyn-based, Bay Area raised visual storyteller and thot leader with BUFU: By Us For Us. Her aim is to build 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, Black femme waging intimacy in the Post-Internet era.
She's
been granted the Human and Civil Rights Award from the National
Association of Education, the Fair Use Award from the Media That Matters
Film Festival, a Civic Arts and Humanities Fellowship with the Flaherty
Film Seminar and was recently featured in SFMoMa's Raw Materials
podcast. In 2015, Jazmin co-founded BUFU: a project-based collective
interested in solidarity amongst Us, co-creating experimental models of
organizing with You. The collective was awarded Eyebeam’s 2017 Trust
Residency and are 2020 residents with the Brooklyn Community Foundation
Incubator Project.
Investigator / Associate Producer
Olivia McKayla Ross is a Caribbean American video artist, programmer, and poet from Queens, New York City. Her work is inspired by the relationship between electronic video and vanity--by deep fantasy, Instagram filters, glamour magic, mirrors, and the fantasies and anxieties of video transmission: immersion, absorption, surveillance, and control. She hopes her practice as a “cyber” doula will encourage her generation to nurture a critical relationship with technology—coining the term data trauma to describe the compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood. Olivia is a recent alum of the School for Poetic Computation and is pursuing a dual-degree in Design & Technology and Screen Studies at The New School. She has also taught at Black Girls Code, BUFU, POWRPLNT, Ethel’s Club, Hacking Hustling, and Pioneer Works.
Her work has been featured in Well Now WTF, Transfer Gallery, Bitch Media, i-D UK and i-D Italy.
Olivia McKayla Ross is a Caribbean American video artist, programmer, and poet from Queens, New York City. Her work is inspired by the relationship between electronic video and vanity--by deep fantasy, Instagram filters, glamour magic, mirrors, and the fantasies and anxieties of video transmission: immersion, absorption, surveillance, and control. She hopes her practice as a “cyber” doula will encourage her generation to nurture a critical relationship with technology—coining the term data trauma to describe the compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood. Olivia is a recent alum of the School for Poetic Computation and is pursuing a dual-degree in Design & Technology and Screen Studies at The New School. She has also taught at Black Girls Code, BUFU, POWRPLNT, Ethel’s Club, Hacking Hustling, and Pioneer Works.
Her work has been featured in Well Now WTF, Transfer Gallery, Bitch Media, i-D UK and i-D Italy.
Producer
Guetty Felin is a filmmaker, writer, and producer of documentaries and narrative films. A native of Haiti, she grew up in New York and came of age cinematically in Paris while pursuing graduate studies in cinema. She went to work in production and distribution of documentary films and directed her first documentary Hal Singer Keep the Music Going. In 2003, she moved to Haiti and became head programmer for Festival Film Jakmel and director of the first cinema workshops; which planted the seeds for the creation of Cine Institute- Haiti's only film school on the south eastern coast. She is co-founder of the multicultural film company BelleMoon Productions. Her first feature-narrative film Ayiti Mon Amour was the first filmed entirely in Haiti by a Haitian-born female director. It premiered in Toronto, travelled in over 40 festivals around the world, and was Haiti's first ever entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Category for the 2018 Academy Awards. Guetty is the founder of "Les Lumieres du Sud" a cinematic encounter in the South of Haiti. She is currently producing Seeking Mavis Beacon and working on her second feature narrative, A Rooster On The Fire Escape. More at www.bellemoonproductions.com
Guetty Felin is a filmmaker, writer, and producer of documentaries and narrative films. A native of Haiti, she grew up in New York and came of age cinematically in Paris while pursuing graduate studies in cinema. She went to work in production and distribution of documentary films and directed her first documentary Hal Singer Keep the Music Going. In 2003, she moved to Haiti and became head programmer for Festival Film Jakmel and director of the first cinema workshops; which planted the seeds for the creation of Cine Institute- Haiti's only film school on the south eastern coast. She is co-founder of the multicultural film company BelleMoon Productions. Her first feature-narrative film Ayiti Mon Amour was the first filmed entirely in Haiti by a Haitian-born female director. It premiered in Toronto, travelled in over 40 festivals around the world, and was Haiti's first ever entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Category for the 2018 Academy Awards. Guetty is the founder of "Les Lumieres du Sud" a cinematic encounter in the South of Haiti. She is currently producing Seeking Mavis Beacon and working on her second feature narrative, A Rooster On The Fire Escape. More at www.bellemoonproductions.com