Our CREW
NYJIA JULY
Director . Producer
From an early age Nyjia knew that storytelling was essential to understanding the world around her. At age nine she got her first taste of documentary with Marc Levin’s BANGIN’ IN LITTLE ROCK. In this film she saw unrest, youth fighting for a voice, and she saw a neighborhood that resembled her own. She saw that film could be used to give people a voice; it could lead to a conversation, an awakening, or resolve beyond the movie theatre. She decided to tell the stories of the people who would otherwise go unheard.
Nyjia is a Washington D.C. native and attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts with a major in Literary Media. She attended college at the University of the Arts with a major in documentary film and a minor in digital journalism. Nyjia has worked with filmmaker Marc Levin and Black Public Media. She has previously worked on the PBS documentary THROUGH A LENS DARKLY, the Emmy-nominated BRICK CITY and the Emmy-winning FREEDOM RIDERS. She became a Corporation for Public Broadcast diversity fellow and a digital media producer with CAAM, the Center for Asian American Media. With CAAM Nyjia created original content and helped program their international film festival.
She’s worked in development with MTV and has been a segment and field producer on numerous docuseries and reality shows. Nyjia’s first documentary JUST US examines the epidemic of generational imprisonment. She was in the SOURCE Magazine as one of 25 women to watch. Her second documentary LISTEN TO MY HEARTBEAT, looks at the gentrification of Washington, D.C. through the gaze of the city’s folkloric music. LISTEN TO MY HEARTBEAT, has been awarded development support through ITVS’s Diversity Development Fund and is amid production.
Nyjia was a BAVC MediaMaker Fellow and was a part of SUNDANCE and Women in Film’s Financing and Strategy Intensive for Independent Women Filmmakers. Nyjia completed the Joan Scheckel directing lab and was a BLACK PUBLIC MEDIA 360 Incubator fellow for 2019.
TREVITE A. WILLIS
Producer
Trevite A. Willis has produced digital content projects, short and feature films since 1999. Currently, Ms. Willis is an executive producer on the Lena Waithe’s produced project, FORTY YEAR OLD VERSION (dir. Radha Blank). She is a producer on a number of projects: ALABAMALAND (dir. April Dobbins), FALSE START (dir. Kareem Mortimer), LISTEN TO MY HEARTBEAT (dir. Nyjia July) and MAYA AND HER LOVER (dir. Nicole Sylvester). In addition, she is a consulting producer on FRANK BEY: YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME (dir. Marie Hinson).
She also produced the human trafficking drama, CARGO, starring Warren Brown (Luther), Jimmy Jean Louis (Claws), Persia White (Girlfriends), and Omar Dorsey (Queen Sugar).
Ms. Willis produced the supernatural thriller, BLOOD BOUND, starring up and coming talent, Eden Brolin (Beyond), Ross Wellinger (Long Distance), Eric Nelsen (Walk Among the Tombstones) and Justiin Davis (Boardwalk Empire), and released in 2019.
Her work includes CHILDREN OF GOD which had theatrical releases in the US, UK and The Netherlands, won 17 awards, and sold in 24 territories.
In 2018, Ms. Willis launched the Southern Fried Film Festival in Huntsville, Alabama with fellow co-founder, Kelley Reischauer.
LEAH ROSS, PHD
Director of Photography
Leah attributes her obsession with documentation to the close relationship she had with her grandparents who were holocaust survivors. For her these relationships cultivated a deep sense of personal responsibility to history, humanity, and social justice. Aptly, she shot her first short during a sit-in at the State University of New York at Albany. She continued making and studying films during her Ph.D. program in Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Leah began working in the industry after an internship with Super! Alright! in Austin in 2007, there she was privileged to work closely with very talented DPs including Tod Campbell and Peter Simonite, as well as director Hector Galan. Her personal films have screened at SXSW (Austin) and Rooftop Films (NYC) and her 35mm slide installations were shown during EAST (Austin) two years consecutively. Her career in Film/TV took her from Austin to Brooklyn, and most currently to Washington, DC.
KELLY ANDERSON
Consulting Producer
Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films. In 2004 Kelly co-produced and co-directed EVERY MOTHER’S SON, a documentary for ITVS about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on the issue of police brutality. EVERY MOTHER’S SON premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, had its broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. and was nominated for an Emmy. In 2000 Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on many PBS stations. Kelly's other documentaries include OUT AT WORK which was screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on HBO. Kelly Anderson's most recent film MY BROOKLYN is a documentary about the ways city government and corporations colluded to reshape Downtown Brooklyn, New York. Anderson is also a professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York City.
D'JUAN TUCKER
Associate Producer