Leila Jarman

Leila is a filmmaker, multimedia artist and feminist activist. Her work focuses on exploring the boundaries of unconventional narrative and subverting expectations and ideals of beauty and aesthetics. She's interested in the dualities and contradictions inherent in nature but specifically within the human existential experience. This interest has pushed her work to explore the human body and its relationship to movement, sound, space and time and allows her to visually explore and juxtapose subtlety and drama, fiction and non-fiction, the beautiful and the grotesque, masculinity and the femininity, etc. the universality of this “human experience theme” has allowed her to explore the topics in film that drive her as a human being and artist: social and political conflict, gender (in)equality, people in diaspora, the body and its relationship to movement in space, music and its relationship people and the moving picture and more. since completing her first documentary feature in 2013, she has had the opportunity to create a variety of types of work, from short films and music videos to video art installations that have been screened at film festivals and galleries around the world including the TATE Britain, Ars Electronica and more. Her video work has been also been featured on media sites such as VICE and The Creator's Project, MTV, VH1 and AfroPunk to name a few. in 2016, she was asked to be the Creative Director of Women's Voices Now, an intersectional and international feminist NGO advocating women's rights through film. She directs the annual international film festival, organizes and teaches filmmaking workshops and programs for underserved populations of women, men and girls and lead symposiums and advocacy events around women’s rights issues and social impact cinema globally. With women’s voices now she has had the opportunity to use her privilege to help women tell their stories in countries where they face unthinkable adversity and have little to no resources or support. in June, 2018, she taught a 4 week intensive social issues documentary filmmaking workshop at the University of Southern California where she instructed 20 teen girls from marginalized communities in Los Angeles resulting in the production and completion of 4 social issues documentary shorts by first time filmmakers.