In the latest profile in our series “Who’s Who in L.A.”, we look at Joy Donnell—a producer and writer focused on the psychospiritual power of storytelling. She is also the author of “Beyond Brand” and “Show Us Your Fire” and cofounder of CIME (pronounced “See Me”), the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment, which researches how our stories make us feel and the tools needed to create restorative narratives.
This Q&A was edited for brevity.
Kevin Bourne: What led you to move from Georgia to Los Angeles?
Joy Donnell: I prefer LA weather and wanted to be closer to the beach. It wasn’t very deep. lol
Kevin: What led you to co-found the Center for Intersectional Media + Entertainment (CIME)? What gap did you see in the industry?
Joy: My work at CIME isn’t responding to a gap in entertainment media. We’re focused on systemic, cinematic segregation and the erasure of certain bodies on screen. That’s not a gap. It’s a pattern. This is why it’s systemic. The stories we all inherit from our entertainment can hijack our imaginations just as easily as they can expand our dreams. We look into the hijacking.
The stories we tell are the stories we sell. But Hollywood censored what could be told and sold in the first place. There were wide sweeping decisions made to keep races separated on screen, to show racialized bodies as stereotypical characterizations, to portray genders in certain ways, and to completely ignore the very existence of certain people. Our research is groundbreaking because it looks into this hidden history and maps how it is still impacting us today.
Cinematic equity requires more than counting bodies on screen. That data is vitally useful, but numbers are the beginning of discovery. Many times, we’ll hear studios say something like, ‘We had five movies starring Latinas last year.’ But were these lead characters wives, maids, or drug dealers? Those characters may have advanced the amount of Latina leads, but they didn’t exactly advance representation. They are still playing into well-heeled narratives of the only type of characters Latinas get to portray on screen in order to fit this subjective idea of relatability.
CIME is my gift to Hollywood creatives. I hope they can use our research to better leverage themselves in the room and better fight for the restorative narratives they want to bring to life. I also hope it’s an offering to humanity so that we can reclaim our power and decide what stories we want to embrace for our future.
Kevin: You’re also a producer and writer with SUPERJOY Media. What inspired you to become a writer and producer?
Joy: I owned the idea of being a Producer first, even though my producing came out of necessity. I needed to have better control over marketing assets like branded content. I started in consumerism. I learned neuromarketing such as color theory, sound design, and other storytelling techniques that encourage consumption or a purchasing event. A lot of our media is dopamine driven. When I started to ask how the media I was creating could impact serotonin and oxytocin levels, my lens as a producer hit a cosmic level. I blew my own mind. That led to my other moments of career growth.
For example, I’ve recently started owning Writer as a title. And by “recently”, I mean within the past five years. It’s strange because I’ve been writing since I was a child. I’ve been heavily anthologized and I’ve written screenplays, but when I became an author, a switch flipped in my self-identity.
Five years ago, I published a book called Beyond Brand. It’s about personal branding through the lens of personal development. After that work of nonfiction, I surprised myself and did something very creative and poetic. My second book, Show Us Your Fire, is poetry and prose that examines self-compassion as our birthright. It explores radical self-love as a disruptive gateway to personal healing, restorative narratives, and the co-creation of sacred social space.
Kevin: On Instagram, you describe yourself as a “wordsmith of wellbeing”. Unpack that a bit. What does that mean to you?
Professor Jody Armour once said to me, ‘This is an important time for folks who work in words.’ I believe that. I’m focused on liberation. Liberation cannot be centered without joy as its nucleus.
All the injustices of the world are connected. So when our senses are bombarded with crises, when the world is bleeding, that lifeblood of fullness is needed most. This is the role of the artist.
Artists must use self-expression to build community. Artists have the capacity to hold the pain of injustice and the joy of aliveness simultaneously.
I dare to focus on wellbeing and reinvent myself through creativity as a healing modality. I dare to do this while oppressive systems seek to enforce utmost homogeneity. When someone models fullness, when someone models being their full self beyond monolithic labels, it reminds us of what we’re fighting for. Fullness maps the critical space around fear and harm. It evokes beloved geography that pushes against the terraforming borders all that hate tries to create.
Our goal is wholeness. Our goal is being safe to be whole without fear of violence. That’s the landscape I wish to create through all of my work.
Kevin: You’ve been described as being a believer in the “psycho-spiritual power of storytelling”. What does that mean to you?
Joy: Unless we actually experience it directly, everything we know about life is a story told to us by a friend, family member, or complete stranger. Every story shapes us. Every story lives somewhere in our mind, in our body, and in our spirit.
We understand psychophysical. We have science around that. Take hiking with a backpack. If you have to climb a summit, when you look at the incline, your brain gets in cahoots with your eyes to make the incline look steeper than it actually is. Before you commit to taking another step forward, your brain wants you to understand that the weight you carry on your back through the backpack means you’re going to have to work harder to get up the hill. The heavier the backpack, the steeper the incline looks. It’s rather brilliant. Your mind, body and spirit work together to help you know how much energy you need.
At CIME, we studied 300 films. We found that 104 of those films, or 35%, had what was considered racial diversity in the cast. But of those 104 films that boasted “mixed casts”, 60 of them — or 58% — included only one character of color. That tells a deeper story visually. It suggests that racial diversity can be held solely by just one person. It implies that more than one is too many. So when we step into the real world and we hear news about executives of color, such as Chief Diversity Officers or Chief People Officers, burning out from being expected to fix systemic issues in the company all by themselves, I think about this type of data.
Our stories shape our beliefs. We build what we believe. How much steeper do these stories we tell make the hills we climb within our human experience?
To connect with Joy Donnell, find her on all social platforms at @doitinpublic.
Related content:
WHO’S WHO IN L.A. | CELEBRITY STYLIST, DEVIN FORD
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT FOR CELEBRITY STYLIST DEVIN FORD | WHO’S WHO IN L.A.
