Ja’Tovia Gary is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and documentarian whose work centers on images of blackness, femininity, and nontraditional origins. Mining archival footage and iconic imagery, her work creates distinctly personal and political narratives aimed at debunking essentialist representations of blackness onscreen. Gary joins us to present a selection of her short film work, which was initially spurred by her experiments with found footage of black icons such as Ruby Dee and Louis Armstrong (An Ecstatic Experience, 2015; Sleep Is the Cousin of Death, 2017) and public television specials from the 1970s (Attachment, 2017; On Punishment, 2017). Gary will also screen an excerpt from her forthcoming feature, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and, for the first time, Giverny I (Negresse Imperiale), a short inspired by her experiences in the eponymous idyllic gardens that influenced the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet. Gary will also participate in a discussion with Dessane Cassell, Joint Curatorial Fellow, MoMA and The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Ashley Clark, season programmer for the British Film Institute’s Black Star program.