2024 Jury

LGBTQ & Student Shorts

Jonathan Kent Adams explores themes of sexuality, spirituality, and place ithin his art. His paintings and drawings encourag self-discovery amid taditions that oftern dey the outsider’s existence. Adams received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Paining in 2014 from the University of Mississippi. He studied under Mary Beth McKenzie at the Art Students League of New York in 2012. Adam lives and creates in Water Valley, Mississippi.

Foreign Language

Ísis is interested in phylogenetics and evolution of species across the Americas. Originally from Brazil, she obtained an M.S. in ecology at the Universidade de Brasília in 2010 and a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Mississippi in 2019, where she studied amphibian diversification in Brazil and phylogeography of Appalachian arthropods. She coordinates the laboratory component of four different biology courses as an Instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi.

Doc Shorts, Fest Forward & Music Videos

Documentary Features

Lena Clark is an actress, stunt woman and Ole Miss Theatre Alum. With nearly 20 years of experience in the film and television industry Lena has appeared in more than 30 productions including Renfield, Bad Moms, Evil Eye, Queen Sugar, Dynasty, Hot Date, The Thing About Pam and others. Most recently she played Goddess Janice in the new Peacock series Twisted Metal.

Mississippi Made

Michelle Emanuel the Head of Metadata and Digital Initiatives in the University of Mississippi Libraries. She has worn many hats on behalf of the Oxford Film Festival: ticket booth and merchandise sales, screening committee member, Operations Director, block programmer, webmaster, printed guide editor and, since stepping down after the 2015 festival, occasional judge.

Narrative Features

Kimel is the Executive Director of Indie Memphis, which supports the community through its annual film festival, year-round programming, youth program, artist development program, and its Black Creators Forum. Kimel is a Memphis native who has a background in corporate finance and is also a multi-hyphenate producer-writer-director who produced the indie film, “Life Ain’t Like the Movies” and directed a horror/comedy short film named “Something’s Off.” Kimel was also named “Top 40 Under 40” in the Memphis Business Journal in 2023 and currently serves on the Board of Directors for ArtHouse Convergence. With Kimel’s multi-faceted background, she loves being able to support underserved communities through the art of film and looks forward to returning to the Oxford Film Festival as a juror for a second year.

Foreign Language

Mississippi Made

Micah Ginn is a 1996 graduate of the University of Mississippi. After college, Ginn moved to Los Angeles to find work in the entertainment industry. His experiences include production, casting, development, directing, writing, and acting. His first job was with Artz & Cohen Casting, CSA, on the feature "Town & Country," starring Warren Beaty, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn. From there, Ginn took a job as an assistant to Tom Huckabee at American Entertainment, Bill Paxton's production company. While there, Ginn handled script coverage/analysis and story research. His next job found him with Gold/Basulto entertainment, serving as development director, screening and evaluating all submitted production materials. He went on to work with that same team on the indie film "Love & Action," serving as assistant to the producers and the director. Ginn has also worked on studio features such as "The Replacements," "Remember the Titans" and "The Sweetest Thing."

After his time in California, Ginn returned to Mississippi where he has produced several independently funded projects. Among them, the documentary "The University Greys: From Students to Soldiers," which is the story of students from Ole Miss who left school to fight in the civil war, which aired on PBS; "October," a short film shot entirely in Oxford, Mississippi, which went on to garner four first-place prizes on the film festival circuit; and, most proudly, Ginn co-directed and produced "Undefeated: The Chucky Mullins Story," which chronicles the story of a truly remarkable and inspiring human being.

Ginn currently holds the position of Associate AD of Sports Productions and Creative Services at Ole Miss. He and his team produce all forms of video and graphic production, and have garnered over 12 Emmy Awards over the past 13 years.

Documentary Features

Film Critic, Association President, Festival Director, Film Historian, Radio Host, Film Festival and Award Show Founder, Adjunct Professor, Executive Director, Brand Creator, and lover of ALL things film, Tim Gordon remains a cinema innovator.

Gordon has served as a programming consultant, panelist, and film festival jury member for several festivals and film series, including Morgan State University’s Arts Festival, Lincoln Theatre’s "Film Feast," Uptown Saturday Night Movie Ministry, Virgin Island International Film Festival, DC Black Film Fest, Over-The-Rhine International Film Festival and the Centre Film Fest.

Film Critic, Association President, Festival Director, Film Historian, Radio Host, Film Festival and Award Show Founder, Adjunct Professor, Executive Director, Brand Creator, and lover of ALL things film, Tim Gordon remains a cinema innovator.

Gordon has served as a programming consultant, panelist, and film festival jury member for several festivals and film series, including Morgan State University’s Arts Festival, Lincoln Theatre’s "Film Feast," Uptown Saturday Night Movie Ministry, Virgin Island International Film Festival, DC Black Film Fest, Over-The-Rhine International Film Festival and the Centre Film Fest.

Narrative Features

Thad Lee is an award-winning filmmaker, a writer of essays, screenplays, and poetry, and a versatile photographer. He earned English and Philosophy degrees from the University of Mississippi and an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of New Orleans. His education includes a poetry workshop in Italy and film studies in Los Angeles, New York, and Spain. His film October won Best Short Film at the inaugural Oxford Film Festival in 2003. In 2020, his adaptation of a short story by Stephen King called “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” was selected by 47 film festivals, winning honors at 29 of them. He recently completed a documentary about photographers Maude Schuyler Clay and Langdon Clay called Two Lives in Photography that is currently being aired on Mississippi Public Broadcasting (MPB). His next film will be a music documentary about Blue Mountain called When You’re Not Mine. Thad was recently honored by the Mississippi Arts Commission with an Artist’s Fellowship in Media Arts. He was also selected by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens to be part of the inaugural group of Artists in Residence in Wilson, Arkansas. He lives with his visual-artist wife Carlyle Wolfe Lee and infant son Luke in Oxford, Mississippi.

Doc Shorts, Fest Forward & Music Videos

Geoff is an animator, director, writer, producer and actor (who also teaches at CU Boulder). His work includes the feature films MARS, Loves Her Gun and Yakona (as producer), as well as the shorts Monkey vs. Robot, The Day Before and most recently The Phantom 52. These films have played at over 100 festivals including Sundance, SXSW and BFI London. He grew up a cowboy with an interest in physics, and has worked in both construction and the Naval Research Lab before becoming a filmmaker. He adores his cat named FatFace, and still genuinely loves making things.

Geoff is an animator, director, writer, producer and actor (who also teaches at CU Boulder). His work includes the feature films MARS, Loves Her Gun and Yakona (as producer), as well as the shorts Monkey vs. Robot, The Day Before and most recently The Phantom 52. These films have played at over 100 festivals including Sundance, SXSW and BFI London. He grew up a cowboy with an interest in physics, and has worked in both construction and the Naval Research Lab before becoming a filmmaker

LGBTQ & Student Shorts

Hannah Parish is a self-taught fiber and assemblage artist from Water Valley, Mississippi. Her work embodies a desire to reclaim space, both emotionally and physically, and to carve out a place to grieve lost memories. Prior to becoming an artist, she made her way as a carhop, a used Buick salesperson, a bespoke menswear specialist, a bookstore manager, and a white-glove receptionist in The Big City. In addition to her art practice, she is a founding member and organizer of the I Know What You Made Last Summer Collective, an organization that hosts fee-free markets for local artists.

Documentary Features

Ryan Parker is a film publicity and marketing consultant with over ten years of experience in the industry, working with virtually every studio and streamer on over 200 film campaigns, many of which were for Oscar-nominated or winning films, including The Iron Claw, CODA, The Two Popes, Hidden Figures, Moonlight, and 12 Years a Slave. He is an executive producer on Black Prom, Camp Manna, I’ll Push You, and On Wings of Eagles. He is a co-executive producer on the documentary Union, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change. Ryan is also the founder and Executive Director of the Mississippi Film Society, a non-profit that works to bring unique film screening and film-based educational programming to the state. He received his PhD in Arts & Religion (with an emphasis on film), and his dissertation was published as Cinema as Pulpit: Sherwood Pictures and the Church Film Movement (McFarland & Co., 2012). He has written, presented, and lectured extensively on film, television, and visual culture. Ryan lives in Jackson with his wife Amy, a pediatric nurse practitioner, and their two pups, Flynn and Ollie.

Mississippi Made

Narrative Features

A film fanatic since forever, Charlie Sanders lives and breathes movies. By day, you’ll find him working as a documentary film specialist for Alabama Public Television. By night, he’s screening thousands of entries as the Festival Programmer for the acclaimed Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. And in-between, he is juggling projects as a partner at FunWolf, a video production house. But too much screen time isn’t good for anyone, so Charlie does take time off to play shows with his band Onehundreds, ride any rollercoaster he can find, and enjoy Tex-Mex every chance he gets.

Foreign Language & Narrative Shorts

Anne Quinney is Professor of French at The University of Mississippi where she teaches courses in contemporary French/Francophone literature and film. As a child she traveled to pre-Glasnost Russia and Armenia several times to make animated films with other child animators as part of a peace project that became the subject of a PBS documentary, Children Are The Future. Originally from New York City, she has resided in Oxford since 2000 and has attended and volunteered every year at the Oxford Film Festival since the first fest. She takes a group of undergraduate UM students every year for two weeks to the Cannes Film Festival. She has also hosted a French film festival on campus for many years. She holds a B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and a Ph.D in French Studies from Duke University.

Doc Shorts, Fest Forward & Music Videos

Johnson is a visual effects artist and filmmaker from Mississippi. With an MFA in Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and a Computer Science degree from Mississippi State, he is equally versed in the creative challenges of filmmaking and the technical details of creating digital imagery.

Johnson has worked as a freelance VFX Supervisor for independent films, branded content, and music videos, with clients like Mountain Dew and Disney. In 2017, he joined The Third Floor, the leading visualization studio for film, and has worked on many innovative projects there including Christopher Robin, Gemini Man, and Masters of the Air.

On Season 2 of The Mandalorian, he led the technical design and rollout of an Unreal Engine-based virtual blocking platform. Today he continues his work as a Lead Developer at The Third Floor and is a respected voice on the topic of Unreal Engine for linear content creation. He and his family are currently based in Atlanta.

LGBTQ

Wash has spent a lifetime pursuing music in the Mississippi gospel tradition. With additional classical training (BM in Choral Music Education & MM in Music Theory from the University of Mississippi), Wash is troubadour of many styles across the United States and abroad. He is the frontman for the Oxford-based party band The Soul Tones, and a member of Three Grand, a trio of performers under Skorman Productions of Orlando. An avid composer, Wash’s scores and recordings have made their way into TV shows and films on STARZ, USA Network, Hallmark, including long-running daytime drama, The Young and the Restless.

Narrative Shorts

Apart from his obsession with cats, gardening, and aspirations to become a hobbit, Michael Williams is a writer, director, cinematographer, and producer known for "OzLand" (2015), "The Atoning" (2017). Williams began creating short films in 2004 while in high school, and later graduated from The University of Southern Mississippi with a Bachelor of Arts in Film where Williams was awarded the Top Film Student of 2009 Award.

When Williams was offered his first job in the industry in 2007, he was hired as a PA. However, upon arriving to prep, he was informed that he would now be the 1st AC. Over a few days of prep, he learned the definition of an assistant camera and how to pull focus... for a feature... with a lot of handheld. This sparked a 9 year career as a 1st AC that rack focused into a career as a cinematographer starting in 2010. During this time, Williams wrote, directed, and produced over 20 short films of his own while waiting for an idea worthy enough to attempt the terrifying task of making a feature. That film became "OzLand", an award-winning feature that premiered and screened theatrically in Hollywood, CA before gaining distribution throughout the U.S. and U.K.

His second feature film, "The Atoning", was released in September of 2017 via Redbox, Hulu, Best Buy, and all major VOD and Cable on Demand outlets before releasing in various international markets including Brazil, Germany, South East Asia, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, and South Korea.

Williams' desire to tell unique and meaningful stories visually fuels his career as a visual storyteller. Williams writes, directs, and works as a cinematographer so that he can bring his passion for visual storytelling to every production giving the story a unique voice. Since coming out of the closet in 2016, Michael's voice as a storyteller has evolved, and it continues to develop with each new project. His passion for storytelling has always been present in his scripts and cinematography, however, discovering and living his true self continues to bring authenticity to his own work and how he interprets his work for other collaborators. His latest scripts, "Rosemary" and "Out in the Open", reflect the personal and creative growth Williams has experienced since coming out, and these in-development projects are just the beginning of a new era of cinematic expression for Williams' passion to share stories with the world

Narrative Shorts

Ned Yousef, SAG/AFTRA Actor StuntMan and Ole Miss Alum with over 100 film and television credits is humbled by the opportunity to join Oxford Film Festival again this year.

After Ole Miss Ned adjudicated and certified through BADC (British Academy of Dramatic Combat) as a Fight Choreographer and Director.

Neds TV and Film appearances include: Twisted Metal, I’m a Virgo, Young Rock, Quiz Lady and We Have a Ghost.

You can catch Ned on the upcoming television series Parish airing on AMC March 31st.