FILM TEAM
“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
― bell hooks
Storytellers often neglect to interrogate their own power, positionality and privilege and tend to re-exploit, objectify, and sensationalize commercial sexual exploitation. Positionality matters. Black girls, womxn and femmes affected are often multiply marginaziled coming from the intersections of intergenerational poverty and trauma, psychological, physical and sexual abuse, systemic inequity in schools, health care and carceral systems, and impacted communities.
Media and the arts have the power to humanize and de-humanize. Storytelling and film in particular is a powerful medium for generating empathy, contextualizing, shifting mental models and transforming our internal narratives. The mainstream media’s ongoing racist stereotypes, tropes, misconceptions and victim-blaming, among other consequences, has created implicit and explicit biases in American and global audiences. With each scene we edited for Still I Rise, we committed ourselves to trauma-informed, culturally aware practices, mindful of our own privilege, power and positional authority as content creators and remained faithful to authentic, ethical and multi-dimensional storytelling.
SHERI SHUSTER
Director + Producer + Co-editor
Sheri Shuster is an Iranian-American filmmaker interested in advancing intersectional and moral conversations about racism and power. An L.A. native, her commitment to human rights drew her into the world of public policy and storytelling. For over fifteen years she worked with nonprofits and elected officials, including former U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos, and The Center for Women and Democracy. From 2008-2012 Sheri served as Associate Director of Covenant House California (CHC) advocating for homeless and sex trafficked youth. The extraordinary youth at CHC in Oakland inspired her directorial debut, Still I Rise (2020). Sheri’s work has been featured at The African American Policy Forum with Professor Kimberle Crenshaw and The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Still I Rise has been supported by the Berkeley Film Foundation, Jamel Perkins, the Harnisch Foundation, and PwC. Sheri is an alumnus of UCLA and the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.
JAMES GRISOM
Editor + Composer +
James Grisom joined the Still I Rise team in 2013, while concurrently a scholarship recipient and wide-receiver for the Cal Bears at UC Berkeley. After graduating, he worked with homeless families in San Francisco at the Hamilton Shelter Program and for the Berkeley Unified School District. In 2017, he became the editor and composer for Still I Rise. James was nominated in the top four at Cambridge University’s Watersprite Film Festival for Filmmaker of the Future Award. In the same year, the African American Policy Forum selected James to participate in Professor Kimberle Crenshaw’s intergenerational Imagining Otherwise program at Vassar College. James is currently an MFA student at USC's Film & Television Production Program.
Dr. Nikki Jones
Academic Advisor
Dr. Nikki Jones is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a faculty affiliate with the Center for the Study of Law and Society. In 2020 she won the Michael J. Hindelang Award, the national honor given by the American Society of Criminology, for her book The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. Her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Professor Jones work includes the sole-authored Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence (2010). Before joining the faculty at Cal Professor Jones was on faculty in the Department of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara (from 2004-2013). She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor DJ JOHNSON
Producer
DJ Johnson serves as Assistant Professor of Practice in the Media Arts + Practice Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is recipient of the USC Mellon Mentoring Award for his outstanding teaching. DJ is a filmmaker and educator who has worked in media education for over twenty years. He serves on the Board of Directors of Picture Alternatives, a nonprofit that uses creative media and high impact storytelling to promote effective alternatives to violence. He has been an envoy of the American Film Showcase, a cultural diplomacy program, since 2017 and has conducted workshops in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mauritania. DJ is an alumnus of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Brown University.
LAYDA NEGRETE
Emmy-award winning producer
Layda Negrete is the Emmy Award-winning producer of Presunto Culpable (Presumed Guilty, 2008), a documentary film that won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism (2011), and went on to win more than twenty awards at international film festivals. She is an attorney with over 20 years of experience conducting criminal justice research in Mexico. Her work has been funded by the United Nations and the World Bank. Layda holds a law degree, master's in public policy and was a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. She recently worked as a senior researcher at the World Justice Project, a rule of law think tank. Layda is currently producing a 4-part series for Netflix.
Maureen Gosling
Editorial Advisor
Maureen Gosling has been creating films for more than thirty years and is best known for her twenty-year collaboration with acclaimed independent director, Les Blank. Gosling's films include Burden of Dreams (1982), Blossoms of Fire (2001), This Ain't No Mouse Music (2013), A New Color (2015) and The Long Shadow (2017). Her work has often focused on themes of people and their cultural values, music as cultural expression and the changing gender roles of men and women. Her films have been seen in countless film festivals around the world, on national public and cable television, on television in Europe, Australia and Asia, and have been distributed widely to educational institutions.
Oscar nominated filmmaker James LeBrecht
Sound Design + Remix
Jim LeBrecht is the Academy-Award nominated director of Crip Camp. He founded Berkeley Sound Artists, an audio post-production house located in Berkeley, California. Known as a skillful sound designer and mixer, LeBrecht’s work can be heard in films that have played on HBO, PBS, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and screened at film festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, South by Southwest, True/False, Telluride and Berlin. A long-time activist for independent living and disability rights, Jim was a member of Disabled in Action in the early 1970s. As a student at the University of California, San Diego, he helped found the Disabled Students Union. Jim continues to advocate for people with disabilities by supporting and producing entertainment that portrays people with disabilities in everyday life.
