Ep 18: Naomi McDougall Jones, award-winning actress, writer, producer
Filmmaking Conversations Podcast with Damien Swaby - A podcast by Damien Swaby
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Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, writer, producer, and women in film activist.
She grew up in Aspen, Colorado and attended Cornell University before graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA).
Naomi wrote, produced, and starred in the 2014 indie feature film, Imagine I'm Beautiful, which took home 12 awards on the film festival circuit including 4 Best Pictures and, for Naomi, 3 Best Actress Awards and The Don Award for Best Independently Produced Screenplay of 2014. The film was named as #8 of OscarWorld's Top 10 Films of 2014 and was distributed theatrically and digitally by Candy Factory Films.
Naomi’s second feature film, Bite Me, is a subversive romantic comedy about the real-life subculture of people who believe that they're vampires and the IRS agent who audits them. In addition to writing the screenplay, Naomi stars in the film opposite Christian Coulson (Harry Potter, Love is Strange, Nashville) and alongside Annie Golden (Orange is the New Black) and Naomi Grossman (American Horror Story). Naomi once again re-teamed with the visionary and award-winning director Meredith Edwards, who also directed Imagine I'm Beautiful, and the film is produced by Jack Lechner (Blue Valentine, The Fog of War, former executive with Mirimax and HBO), Sarah Wharton (That's Not Us), and Joanne Zippel (Zip Creative). The film will premiere in March 2019, followed by a general release.
A pilot she wrote, The Dark Pieces, was named on the 2016 WriteHer List as one of the top 16 unproduced pilots by a female screenwriter and is now in development for Canadian TV.
She was a writer for season 1 of Amazon's original series, The New Yorker Presents, based on the world's most award-winning magazine, which premiered at Sundance 2016, for which she wrote the teleplay adaptation of Miranda July's short story Roy Spivey.
Naomi has been a vocal advocate for bringing gender parity to film, both on and off screen. She has spoken at film festivals and conferences around the world and written extensively on this subject. In November 2016, Naomi gave a TEDTalk, The Women in Film Revolution Begins With You.
She has teamed up with former CFO of the City of Chicago, Lois Scott, to found The 51 Fund, a VC investment fund that will finance films written, directed, and produced by women.
She is currently at work on a book, The Wrong Kind of Woman: Dismantling the God of Hollywood, which is to be published by Beacon Press in January 2020.
She hosts the podcast Fear(ful)less: Filmmaking From the Edge, a monthly window into the successes, failures, and conversations of an independent filmmaker, which is available on iTunes and GooglePlay.
Naomi lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, Stephen.
