Jason Fitzroy Jeffers
He // Him // His
[ID: A black-and-white portrait of a Black man with a mustache, beard, and shoulder-length locs wearing a back button-up shirt and silver, circular glasses.]
Portrait photo by A’mya McKnight.
Miami, FL
2023 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by Sarah Arison.
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Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados whose work focuses on giving rooted and nuanced voice to the Caribbean, pockets of subtropical Black life across the American South, and other marginalized, equatorial, Afro-diasporic spaces. Jeffers has written and produced award-winning shorts such as Papa Machete that have screened at film festivals such as Sundance Film Festival, BlackStar, the Toronto International Film Festival, and more. More recently, he codirected the short film Drowning by Sunrise for The Intercept, and produced T, the 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale. Prior to his work in film, Jeffers was a journalist with the Miami Herald and various media outlets across South Florida.
In addition to his filmmaking, he is a cofounder and former coexecutive director of the Miami-based Caribbean filmmaking collective Third Horizon, which stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. It was named one of the “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” in 2019 and 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. For his work at the intersection of filmmaking, community building, and social justice, Jeffers was named a 2019 Ford Foundation/Rockwood Leadership Institute JustFilms Fellow and a 2022 USC Annenberg Civic Media Fellow. For his work on his upcoming feature-length documentary debut, The First Plantation, Jeffers was named a 2021 Doc Society New Perspectives Fellow, a 2022 Define American Fellow, and a 2022 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow.