Maori Karmael Holmes

Maori will write a feature length screenplay exploring the legacy of Black liberation movements in the 1970s, the resultant experience of Generation X, hip-hop, drug addiction, class strife, and gaps between second and third wave feminisms. Maori’s goal is to sympathetically dissect a community not often depicted on screen and examine generation gaps in both the feminist and racial justice movements; complicate the current Black social media trope of the “hotep;” and explore the nuances of class, race, and education. 

Maori will produce, direct and edit four music videos featuring four independent musical groups of socially progressive artists based in Philadelphia and Washington DC— Fertile Ground, Kamilah Clarke, Luminous Flux, and W. Ellington Felton. Each of these musicians strives to create social change through their music, but this message is often lost on those who depend on the radio for information. Maori will create these videos to get people’s attention and set a complimentary visual tone for the music, while pushing people to think critically about other ways hip hop can be without always resorting to the “booty-shakin’, car bouncin’, grills flashin’ charade.” These videos will be shared in movie theatres, live shows, schools, and other public spaces in efforts to expose people to new music, with the hope that the strong aesthetic statements these artists make will shift people’s notions of what is considered alluring and sexually or materially desirable.

Maori works primarily as a filmmaker, taking on the roles of producer, director, editor, costume designer, and screenwriter. All of her work brings to the center the work of other artists creating art that is "under the radar", with a focus on giving women of color and other marginalized groups a chance to be seen, heard, and understood on their own terms. As a filmmaker, she challenges mainstream notions of race, identity, beauty, and gendered power structures, providing an alternative to corporate-produced mass media and their one-sided portrayals and stereotypes. These issues come up in her work with young people, such as her media residency at West Philadelphia High School's Media Arts program, where she led workshops for 10th- and 11th-grade novice filmmakers to create their own 15-minute narrative about issues important to them and their community. In 2006, she produced and curated the one-day festival Phresh: Celebrating Women in Hip-hop at the Painted Bride Art Center, focusing on the work of women in hip-hop. Maori's documentary film, Scene Not Heard, explores the history of women's participation in hip-hop culture in Philadelphia, featuring a range of artists and groups from the Jazzyfatnastees to Bahamadia. Created out of a need to understand why women were absent from mainstream venues,Scene Not Heard sought to find these women, tell their stories, and introduce them to new audiences. Currently, Maori is volunteering as director of the Black Lily Film & Music Festival, which builds upon the roots of the Black Lily music series started in the nineties to lift up the work and voices of underground and politically conscious women artists.

Maori created promotional DVDs and collateral materials for her documentary film Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop, which chronicles the abundance of powerful female voices that Philadelphia has produced as artists, promoters, and writers in the hip-hop and soul community. Scene Not Heard features interviews with some of the originators of modern hip-hop culture such as Lady B, Schoolly D and Rennie Harris, with vanguards chiming in including Bahamadia and Ursula Rucker, and presents current talents such as the Jazzyfatnastees, Ms. Jade, and Lady Alma, and emerging talents such as Versus, Keen of Subliminal Orphans, and Michele Byrd-McPhee of Montazh. Maori's goal was to tell the story of these women and highlight their struggle to succeed in a male-dominated industry in a city that has been left behind in the national conversation. She plans to use the film to travel to conferences and workshops around the world and distribute the DVDs to classrooms, community centers, and other organizations using hip-hop as an educational tool.