Pamela Woolford is a filmmaker, writer, and performer—three forms of a storyteller. As such she specializes in creative nonfiction stories, fiction inspired by true-life stories, and fiction inspired by the history of a people. Her work is especially concerned with the lives of black women and girls and others whose joy, history, and inner life are underexplored in American media and popular art.
Woolford has been a North Beach American Film Festival Jury Award winner for her film Generation, an Experimental Forum Honorary Mention Award winner for her “vision and the film’s unique contribution to cinema,” a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award winner for screenwriting, and a recipient of an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates.
She began her career writing her award-winning screenplay Emile in the early 1990s and publishing poetry and literary nonfiction in newspapers and journals. Trained in modern, West African, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and Katherine Dunham dance techniques, she became a member of Aurora Dance Company in the mid-‘90s and later Mianaja Oriental Danse Ensemble. She went on to choreograph and perform solo fusion dances in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. She then trained in acting at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, and trained in and began performing voiceovers. In 2016 Woolford directed film scenes for her conceived multidisciplinary memoir Meditations on a Marriage, a project which made her a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted her for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize. In 2017 she wrote, directed, and costarred in the scripted vlog series Truth & Story.
Author of more than 100 published short stories, essays, and articles, Woolford’s written work has been selected for anthologies and translated into German. She bases the script for Generation on her short story “Just After Supper,” nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize by novelist Mark Wisniewski. Her writings are cited in many books and scholarly works, including L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema edited by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (University of California Press, 2015) and Shaping the Future of African American Film by Monica White Ndounou (Rutgers University Press, 2014).
“Pamela’s artistry opens a window to allow us to view ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors in those...people,” Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones has written about Woolford’s fiction.
NPR Best Book author and 2018 NAACP Image Award nominee Marita Golden calls Generation "lovely and groundbreaking. Beautifully shot. Very evocative."
