Image: Portrait of Kwesi, a young Black masculine person dressed in overalls in the middle of a river. Kwesi is framed by branches of trees. Taken on 120mm Kodak Ektar 100 film stock. July, 2023. Photo by Ireashia Bennett.
Photo of Ireashia Bennett filming a recent project, November, 2023 captured by Lamont N. Gibson.
Ireashia M. Bennett (they/them) is a Philadelphia-based Black, queer, and disabled filmmaker, writer, and photographer. They have over five years of work experience in journalism, interdisciplinary research, and film. Their work takes the form of new media, short and experimental films, as well as written and multimedia essays. They view filmmaking as a medium with the power of visibility and memory. As such, they wield this medium intending to celebrate and amplify stories and lived experiences that have been omitted or silenced. With this in mind, their films serve as sites of truth-telling, liberation, re-imagination, and reclamation.
They are a recipient of the two-year RaD Lab + Outside the Walls fellowship at Threewalls and the SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition. Their artistic roots are in Chicago, where their creative work has been exhibited in art spaces such as the Sullivan Galleries, Arts Incubator, Stony Island Arts Bank, and the Chicago Art Department in Chicago.
They earned a B.A. in Journalism from Columbia College Chicago and are pursuing an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. They currently work as the Visuals Editor at Sixty Inches From Center, Philadelphia Artist Spotlight Fellow at cinéSPEAK Journal, and the Co-Director of the Diamond Screen Film Festival at Temple University.
In their free time, they write about films on their Substack, Welcome to The Z Axis.