Pro
Contessa Gayles
Biography
Contessa Gayles is a documentary filmmaker, an award-winning journalist and an Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movement, healing, liberation and radical imagination, with a focus on race and gender.
From 2014 - 2018, she was a producer at CNN, where she created, produced, directed, shot and edited award-winning original series and documentaries, including The Feminist on Cellblock Y (2018 Vera Institute Award Winner, 2018 Eppy Award Finalist), Women Who March_ (2018 Webby Award Honoree, 2017 Eppy Award Finalist),[ Women Who March: The Movement](https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/politics/women-who-march-the-movement/) (2018 Eppy Award Winner), [_This Is Birth with Lisa Ling](https://money.cnn.com/this-is-birth-with-lisa-ling/) & This Is Sex with Lisa Ling_ (2017 & 2018 Namic Vision Award Nominees), [_Unstereotyped](http://money.cnn.com/news/unstereotyped/) and the 2016 News & Documentary Emmy-nominated Feeding America's Most Vulnerable Children. _She has since contributed to VICE, PBS NewsHour, PBS Frontline, CBS, Al Jazeera, Vox, WIRED, AFROPUNK and documentary features, including SHOWTIME’s _Surge (dir. Hannah Rosenzweig, Wendy Sachs) and forthcoming films, including Black Mothers (dir. Débora Souza Silva) and others.
Contessa earned a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. in Journalism from New York University, with a concentration in Documentary Film. Her thesis documentary, School of Yoga, screened at the 2015 DOC NYC film festival. She is currently creating and directing independent film projects under her production company, Cocomotion Pictures. As an independent filmmaker, her work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, SFFILM, Artemis Rising Foundation, Skoll Foundation and others_. _She was a 2020 SFFILM filmmaker in residence and is a 2021 Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMaker fellow, and an inaugural Film Independent/Netflix Amplifier fellow.