See Me with Kisha Jarrett and Dawn Jones Redstone
On the latest episode of Radical Listening, hosts Phil Johnson and Clifton Holznagel sit with Kisha Jarrett and Dawn Jones Redstone to talk about the new short film See Me, now playing at the Portland International Film Festival.
Like and Subscribe to receive Radical Listening updated on YouTube!
KISHA JARRETT is the Managing Director at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon. She is a creative change-maker with a background in marketing and development throughout her ten-year career in Arts Management that has helped raise over $50 million dollars for various organizations and has a cumulative earned revenue of over $5 million. A Virginia native, she has lived all over the country but now calls Portland, Oregon home. Kisha is also a writer, director, producer, actor, musician, and storyteller. She has performed for both stage and screen, been a musician at SXSW, and has been a costume designer for the stage and television, and an independent bakery owner.
Through storytelling, she has performed for the Moth (2017 and 2018 GrandSLAM winner), Seven Deadly Sins, Wildfang, and Back Fence PDX where she is a co-host and story producer. Most recently, Kisha was seen onstage at Portland Center Stage @ The Armory as the Headmistress in School Girls; or The African Mean Girls Play, a co-production with Artists Rep. Currently, she is working on her second feature-length screenplay, pre-production for a feature-length documentary (Black Girl in the Woods, documenting a hike-thru of the Pacific Northwest Trail) and an educational piece for the Oregon Bar Association (about the four black suffragettes in Oregon who deserve to have their stories told), post-production on the first devised DNA: Oxygen short film (See Me), and writing her first novel.
Kisha is proud to be a co-founder of the DNA: Oxygen program at ART. She is in the inaugural cohort of the LORT EDI Mentor/Mentee program and serves on the LORT EDI committee. Kisha is on the Literary Arts Festival of the Book Committee and has served as an Event Producer for Oregon Media Production Association (OMPA), Children’s Book Bank, Boys and Girls Club, Artists Rep, Live Arts, MTV Woodie Awards, Invisible Children, World Monuments Fund, and School of Visual Arts. She serves on the board of directors of the Global Works Community Fund.
DAWN JONES REDSTONE is an award-winning queer, Latinx writer/director whose films have screened around the globe. Her work often features women of color and explores themes of resistance, feminism, and the internal machinations that help us transform into the people we want to become. She was named a Woman of Vision by the Oregon Daily Journal of Commerce and has been awarded grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Northwest Film Center, MRG Foundation, and more. In 2017, she was selected to shadow director Debra Granik on the set of Leave No Trace as part of the 5to50 program with support from Oregon Film. She believes in using her writing/hiring decisions to lift people up and help create a filmmaking community that reflects and brings needed perspective to the world we live in. Ever since her first short in 2015, Dawn’s cast and crews are mostly made up of women of color.
Before becoming a full-time filmmaker, Dawn worked as a union carpenter and as a training manager at Oregon Tradeswomen for a combined total of 15 years. She’s also a returned Peace Corps Volunteer. She resides with her wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon. Dawn directed the short See Me with Artists Repertory Theater and it will have its premiere at Portland International Film Festival in March 2021. She is currently preparing to make her first feature film.