About Shontina

Shontina Vernon is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and musician exploring Black subjectivities,  intergenerational legacies around healing and trauma, and queerness. Drawing from her early experiences with the criminal justice system, her work experiments to disrupt narratives of erasure and to investigate the intersections of race, gender, and class. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington.

Vernon is an Art for Justice Grantee, a Creative Capital Award recipient, and a Conductive Garboil Award recipient for her community based work as Lead Producer and Head of Development for the Visionary Justice StoryLab, a collective and film production hub evolving narratives rooted in liberation. Her plays and films have been developed and presented by HBO, New York Theatre Workshop, LaMaMa in collaboration with NEC, Northwest Film Forum, and ACT Theatre in Seattle among others. Vernon has served as an advisor and facilitator for the Arthouse Convergence working to advance racial justice in film.

Recent works include GRRRL Justice - an experimental short looking at the resistance and liberatory practices of girls and queer youth of color impacted by the juvenile justice system, and HER BLACK BODY POLITIC - a community devised spoken word and movement piece exploring the politics of the black female body and the way it occupies literal and poetic space.

Vernon is currently developing LAST KIND WORDS, a feature film on 1930s Black queer Blues life and completing post production on CONSIDER THE RAINBOW, a limited episodic series centering Black and Brown queer women who have been impacted by the criminal justice system,

Vernon currently resides in Atlanta, GA.