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Courtney Staton
- Location:
- United States
- Languages:
- English
- Issues:
- Disability Rights, LGBTQIA+, Child Welfare, Education, Racial Injustice, Mass Incarceration & Criminal Justice Reform, Economic Injustice, Privacy and Surveillance, Women and Girls, Human Rights
- Expertise:
- Educational materials, Impact Producing, Consulting, Impact Strategist/Advisor, Campaign Implementation, Crafting Classroom Materials, Designing impact guides, Alternative Distribution, Impact evaluation
- Cultural/racial identity:
- Black American
- Self identification:
- Woman
Bio
Courtney Symone Staton, from Greenville, North Carolina, is a Black organizer, impact producer, poet, and filmmaker dedicated to creating space for collective liberation through the sharing of stories. Her debut film, Silence Sam, a participatory hybrid of documentary and poetry about the systemic silencing of activism during a movement to remove a Confederate monument from campus, premiered at BlackStar Film Festival in 2019, and since then has had impact-driven screenings across the South. Courtney believes deeply in reclaiming Black history, and uplifting stories of Black changemakers whose legacy we live in in the present, creating and leading Youth FX’s History Reclamation Project, a program reconnecting local high school students to Albany’s legacy of activism through participatory documentary filmmaking. Courtney also believes in mapping where community power lies and making that power visible. She currently does this in by co-leading The Map Project, a program for fifth grade students to make participatory documentaries about people and places who have made them feel powerful in the South End of Albany NY. A NeXt Doc fellow and impact producer of Emmy-nominated documentary “The Neutral Ground,” unpacking monuments, myth and how to break up with the Confederacy. Courtney works to drive viewers past the point of empathy to the point of healing and action.
