Michelle Renee Jackson, a Pine Plains resident, has dedicated her career to preserving and sharing overlooked histories. As a filmmaker, scholar, and storyteller, she seeks to create dialogue around the past and its enduring impact. Her 2017 film, “Another Slave Narrative,” continues this mission.
Featuring a multiracial cast performing six firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people recorded in the 1930s, her project intentionally mismatches actors’ race and gender with the historical figures they portray. Jackson believes this approach helps share the responsibility of telling these stories while also making them resonate with diverse audiences.
“Another Slave Narrative” will screen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 8, at Stissing Center. “The film is a tool and a catalyst for non-partisan and multiracial dialogue about slavery, and a way forward,” Jackson told the Herald.
Jackson grew up in Southern California and graduated from UCLA in 2004. Initially planning to become a professor of New Testament Studies, she pursued graduate work at Princeton Theological Seminary and later earned a master’s at Harvard Divinity School. While in Cambridge, she explored performance through slam poetry, regularly appearing at the Lizard Lounge.
In 2010, while serving as the Tanenbaum Interreligious Fellow at Vassar College, Jackson sought creative engagement beyond academia. She took advantage of faculty privileges to enroll in a screenwriting course, an experience that helped her recognize storytelling as an extension of her scholarly and spiritual pursuits.
While researching a screenplay, she encountered Norman Yetman’s “When I Was a Slave,” a collection of firsthand accounts recorded during the 1936-1938 WPA Federal Writers’ Project. The stories, archived in the Library of Congress, offered rare insight into the lives of formerly enslaved people. Jackson was struck by how little-known these narratives were.
“Does anyone know these stories exist?” she recalled wondering. In a 2017 interview, she described feeling an immediate need to share them. “I felt compelled to go to my colleagues and friends and tell them about the interview I read with Mary Reynolds and the things she went through as a slave because someone has got to know about this.”
The film has been used in American history courses at Georgetown University and presented in boarding schools, where Jackson believes the communal environment fosters deeper engagement. She often hears questions about why slavery should be revisited at all — an inquiry that inspired the film’s title. “There are varying perspectives,” Jackson said, “but not enough people know about it. Particularly for those of us who are descendants of slavery, the least that we can do is continue to tell those stories.”
Jackson operates Simuel & Murray, a bicoastal film, video, and photography business with an office in Millerton. In 2022, she and her partner, Chris, purchased a small farm in Pine Plains, where they live with their goats and an English Mastiff named Lolli.
The screening on Saturday offers audiences an opportunity to engage with these firsthand accounts through Jackson’s unique storytelling.