QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA ARTS PROJECT-QWOCMAP

QWOCMAP actively invests in, develops, and nurtures the creativity and leadership of our community, which is 20% African Descent/Black (African & African American), 22% Asian & Asian American, 21% Chicanx/Latinx, 10% First Nations/Native American/Indigenous, 5% Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander, 10% Southwest Asian, North African/Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian (SWANA/AMEMSA), and 12% Mixed-Race lesbian, bisexual, queer women of color, and gender variant and transgender people of color. Our community is also 79% low-income, 15% unemployed & marginally housed, 42% immigrant, 38% disabled, chronically ill & environmentally at-risk, 30% youth, and 12% elders.

QWOCMAP tailors programs to meet the needs of specific segments of our multi-racial, pan-ethnic LBTQ people of color population, which in turn expands participation and amplifies impact. We partner with other organizations that have significant complementary expertise and experience in serving our intersecting communities.

QWOCMAP is the only organization in the nation, and the first of four such organizations in the world, that specifically serves queer women of color, and gender nonbinary and transgender people of color through filmmaking. QWOCMAP has expanded gender and racial equity in the film industry by launching the careers of 350+ filmmakers.

Our Filmmaker Training Program equips our community with the concrete technical skills, practical artistic knowledge, and tangible leadership tools to create new films that address interconnected social justice issues. It provides rigorous professional training, along with filmmaking equipment, intensive coaching, and learning and career resources without cost to participants. It combines hands-on practice with industry standard equipment and interactive technical lectures that cover the entire filmmaking process from story development and cinematography, to editing and film distribution. Its proven, award-winning curriculum demystifies filmmaking in a safe, supportive, collaborative, and fun environment. Finally, it provides invaluable production experience so that each participant emerges as a filmmaker with a new film to their name, which is a major accomplishment in the male-dominated film industry. It offers additional learning and work opportunities for participants through QWOCMAP Productions, which provides videography, production and editing services to nonprofit, foundation, and artist clients. In addition, this intensive investment launches new careers that build the capacity, resilience, and economic viability of our community.

Since 2000, our award-winning Filmmaker Training Program has nurtured the creation of 425 films, leading both U.S. and global production of films created by our community. QWOCMAP Filmmakers report high qualitative scores for self-efficacy and agency and high quantitative scores for filmmaking skills and knowledge development. Many have gone on to successfully complete highly competitive, premier graduate film programs at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, UCLA, Temple, San Francisco State University, and UC Santa Cruz. They are leaders at organizations like NBCUniversal, Pandora, Google, and the ACLU, and in sectors from education and philanthropy, to the arts and electoral politics, with a run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

In 2012, in response to a multi-year-long waiting list and workshop requests from Egypt and Uganda to China and Thailand, QWOCMAP redesigned the Filmmaker Training Program to tour across California and the U.S. That year, we conducted a workshop for Two Spirit Dine’ women in Gallup, near the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock, New Mexico. In 2015, QWOCMAP conducted our first international Spanish-language cross-border filmmaking workshop in Tijuana, Mexico.

Our long-term partnership with Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits (BAAITS) resulted in a 2009 focus on Two Spirits in our Filmmaker Training Program, which drove attendance when these films world-premiered at our 2010 Queer Women of Color Film Festival, and developed subsequent interest in our Distribution Program. It also increased overall Two Spirit participation in our programs, which at 10% is proportionately higher than U.S. Census figures for the Bay Area at 0.5 to 1.0% Native American. In 2017, we partnered with BAAITS again and now have the largest catalog of Two Spirit films in existence.