Director’s Statement

“I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn’t find a book that did that, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll write it and then I’ll read it.’ It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing.”

-Toni Morrison

A survey of my body of work: published essays, short films, street, documentary and birth photography, reveals a clear focus: the lives of Black women and the transformative power of their labour and love.

My work is a natural extension of my lived experience as a Black queer woman, raised in public housing by a Jamaican single mother. As a discerning teenager, I started to recognize contradictions between how the world viewed Black communities and how we saw ourselves. There was nothing “marginalized” about how my mother cared for me and my siblings.  My friends and I didn’t feel we were any more “at risk” than the average teenager. I began to realize how the negative narratives attributed to Black communities upheld structural inequalities. These shortcomings were part of the environment outside of Black bodies.There was nothing inherently Black about them.

By the time I reached young adulthood, I was actively seeking a form of expression that could challenge these destructive narratives. An unlikely friendship with a 72-year-old screenwriter from New York led to my discovery that film could do just that.  

It’s been my ongoing mission to address the film industry’s glaring negation/mischaracterization of Black women despite their vital role in the preservation of culture, family and justice. My work strives to right this historic wrong by focusing my lens on Black women and the expansive (never marginalized) grandeur of our lives.

Laurie Townshend