Zenzele Ojore
2022 HEAR US Awardee
Graduate Film Class of 2022
Zenzele Ojore is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist born in Houston, Texas (raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia with kin from Opelousas, Louisiana). Her award-winning short films have played at festivals including Sundance and SXSW. She received her undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018, and is presently a dean fellow in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Project
The South is My Sister's Skin (Feature)
In 2019, Zenzele made the short film "The South is My Sister's Skin," which served to create a portrait of her earliest childhood through a series of vignettes of her family. She now returns to that story, seeking to expand it into a narrative feature film that tracks her and her sister's coming-of-age story as two black girls born and raised in the American South.
For her grant project, she will be doing field research in several states in the American South this upcoming summer as she works to develop her concept into a feature-length film script.
