Jessica Jones is a documentary filmmaker, with a focus on cultural and social justice narratives. She believes in the power of media to expose stories and truth, spark conversations, and break down barriers. Jessica grew up in Dallas with her white mother, and her black father. Growing up she knew few others that identified as biracial or multiracial, and that was deeply confusing, challenging where and how she fit in.
Jessica is passionate about Mixed People’s History because she believes a platform around mixed-race identity would have aided her (ongoing) quest for knowledge-of-self.
Jessica Jones
Paul Bothwell is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on raising the visibility of communities. Past work has included documenting migrant rural Chinese laborers, and suburban Maryland immigrant youth.
Born to a Chinese mother and Scottish father in the San Francisco Bay Area, confusion about his identity arose in his youth when standardized testing only allowed one race to be identified. Continual dissatisfaction with limited spaces to discuss multi-racial identity led to a desire of forming a platform to speak out.
Paul Bothwell
Imani Karpowich-Smith, a Berkeley native, is an interdisciplinary artist and videographer with a background in library work. Often mistaken as white, her Black identity always clashed with people’s expectations. The questions and assertions she encountered claimed they knew her better than herself, and denied her own heritage. More than frustrated, and hungry to find others who understood her experience, Imani grew up dreaming of creating work for people like herself.
Passionate about universal access to Multiracial information, her life’s goal is for no Multiracial child to feel alone, and for them to confidently identify as they choose throughout their lifetime, no questions asked.
Imani Karpowich-Smith
Josef Palermo is an intermedia artist specializing in experiential site-specific projects. His body of work reveals and recontextualizes constructs of identity, from the individualized self to the macro collective social structure.
Josef primarily works in new media, seeking the liminal spaces between artistic forms and facilitating interventions for audiences to actively engage with art, as well as with each other—revealing universal truths and enabling insights into the core of the human condition.
He is a second-generation "mixed" American born to a biracial mother and a multiethnic father, and is currently based in Washington, DC.