Love, Jamie

Jamie Diaz is a 66-year-old Mexican-American trans woman and self-taught artist who has spent nearly 30 years in a men’s prison in Texas. See how her enduring friendship with Gabriel Joffe, a volunteer who happened upon one of her works, has helped Jamie’s art reach far beyond the prison walls.

The post Love, Jamie appeared first on American Masters.

Explore the story artist Jamie Diaz, a trans woman and self-taught artist who has spent nearly 30 years in a men’s prison in Texas.

In 2013, Gabriel Joffe was volunteering for an organization advocating for LGBTQ+ people who are incarcerated, when they happened upon a letter written by Jamie Diaz. Joffe was captivated by the elaborate, colorful illustrations that adorned the letter, and felt compelled to write back. Hundreds of letters and phone calls later, a deep and profound friendship formed between Diaz and Joffe. Though physically separated by walls and miles, the pair have sustained each other through pivotal life moments including gender transition.

During the years of her incarceration, Jamie Diaz became an ever more prolific artist, spending her days in her cell creating works of art with the limited supplies available to her. With brushes fashioned out of human hair, she embarked on a mission to produce the largest collection of queer themed art in the world. She began sending her growing body of paintings and comics to Joffe, who archived and cataloged them on a website where they caught the eye of Daniel Cooney, owner of a New York City gallery well known for bringing largely unknown artists into the public eye. Together, Cooney and Joffe would mount Jamie Diaz’ first solo exhibition, while she remained confined a thousand miles away in prison.

Love, Jamie is a film about pride, chosen family, and the transcendent power of art.

A statement from artist Jamie Diaz

Being a part of this film has brought lots of joy and good people into my life, and I feel so blessed and honored to be in such a position to share my art with the world. It’s been an amazing experience to be sure.

Creating art is what I do. I’ve always done art and I will as long as I am able. I don’t just want my work to look good, I want it to have some significance that people can relate to, which is why most of my art are representations of the human spirit and the queer and trans experience. I am deeply inspired by LGBTQ+ people and the beautiful queer lives we live, and it’s really important for me to share that.

What I would like audiences to take away from the film is love and understanding. To look at my art and the story of my friendship with Gabriel and feel the love, hope, and pride we share. It is my hope that the film will also help to open the hearts of those who don’t know people like us. I believe it is important to shed as much light as possible on inequality as well as show the humanity, integrity, and courage of our people.

About director and editor Karla Murthy

Karla Murthy is an Emmy-nominated producer and has been working on news documentaries for over 15 years as a producer, cinematographer and correspondent for several PBS news programs. Her award-winning work was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as “compelling, informative and compassionate.”

Her directorial debut, the feature documentary The Place That Makes Us, screened at film festivals including DOC NYC and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, winning awards including Best of the Festival at Arlington Film Festival, Best Feature at Better Cities Festival and Emerging Documentary Filmmaker at Woods Hole Film Festival, and screened at the United Nations World Cities Day Event. The film had its national broadcast premiere on the WORLD Channel/PBS series America ReFramed.  She is currently in production on her next feature documentary called The Gas Station Attendant, a co-production with ITVS and Firelight Media.

Murthy is of Filipino and South Asian descent. She grew up in Texas, where she studied classical piano at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, and graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in Religion and Computer Science.  She is based in New York City, and is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Film Fatales.

About producer and director of photography Andrew Fredericks

Andrew Fredericks is a veteran film and television director, producer, editor and cinematographer. His many films have appeared on ABC, NBC, PBS, National Geographic, Bravo and Hulu along with film festivals worldwide. He has worked with preeminent journalist Bill Moyers on a host of documentaries and conversations, as well as collaborations with Alex Gibney, Abigail Disney, St. Clair Bourne and pioneering documentarian, Tom Spain.

He edited the award winning, I Came to Testify, from the highly acclaimed PBS series, Women War and Peace, and edited and wrote Looks Like Laury, Sounds Like Laury, which was named one of the top ten television documentaries of 2015 by The New York Times. More recently, Fredericks edited the Emmy Award winning Armor of Light, directed by Abigail Disney, John Leguizamo’s Road to Broadway, and produced and edited the award-winning documentary, 3212 Un-Redacted.

His most recent projects include shooting and directing a film examining the effects of the school murders on the community in Uvalde, TX, through the lens of the journalists at the town’s independent newspaper. Also in the works is Last Kid Picked, a feature documentary about the revolutionary gay artist, Bernard Perlin.

About executive producer Zackary Drucker

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SFMoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.

She directed the 2023 Hulu documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl and co-directed two recent projects: the 2023 documentary The Stroll which premiered at Sundance and won a Peabody and 2022’s documentary series The Lady and the Dale, both released on Max. She is a producer on Biosphere, an IFC theatrical film released in July 2023.

About composer Andrew Yee

GRAMMY Award-winning cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet, who have released several albums to critical acclaim including Yee’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which thewholenote.com praised as “…easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.

Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.

The post Love, Jamie appeared first on American Masters.