Jacqueline Olive

Jacqueline Olive is an independent filmmaker and immersive media producer with more than fifteen years of experience in journalism and film. Her debut feature documentary, Always in Season, examines the lingering impact of more than a century of lynching African Americans. Always in Season premiered in competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency. It has received numerous festival jury awards and other honors that include winner of the 2020 SIMA Documentary Jury Prize For Ethos and nominations for Best Writing from IDA Documentary Awards 2019 and the Spotlight Award from Cinema Eye Honors 2019. Always in Season broadcast on the Emmy Award-winning PBS series, Independent Lens, on February 24, 2020. Jackie also co-directed and co-produced the award-winning hour-long thesis film, Black to Our Roots, which broadcast on PBS WORLD in 2009. Jackie has received artist grants and industry funding from Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Firelight Media, Tribeca Film Institute, Independent Television Service (ITVS), Chicken & Egg Pictures, International Documentary Association, Kendeda Fund, Catapult Film Fund, Southern Documentary Fund, Alternate ROOTS, and more. She was recently awarded the Emerging Filmmakers of Color Award from International Documentary Association (IDA) and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and profiled one of Variety's "10 Filmmakers To Watch." Jackie worked for three seasons on the production team of the Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary series, Independent Lens. She also helped launch the internationally-themed PBS documentary series Global Voices. With a background in journalism, as well as filmmaking, Jackie worked as a cinematographer filming news, sports, and weather for the NBC news affiliate in her hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After several years of filming and one-man-band reporting, Jackie left news to focus on the long-form, in-depth storytelling that is her passion. She earned a master's degree from the University of Florida, Documentary Institute and has participated in the U.C. Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, Carey Institute for Global Good's Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, Firelight Media Documentary Lab, Chicken & Egg Accelerator Lab, Sundance Documentary Edit & Story Lab, Sundance Music & Sound Design Lab and Sundance Catalyst. Jackie has gained experience with immersive media production as a fellow with the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Institute for New Media Technologies and Mediamaker Fellows, the Black Public Media New Media Institute, and most recently, the Open Immersion VR Lab sponsored by the Ford Foundation, National Film Board of Canada, and the Canadian Film Centre. In 2010, Jacqueline created the prototype for a virtual reality, role-playing environment that offers viewers an immersive look at the choices and circumstances that can lead to lynch mob violence. The VR project is called Always in Season Island, and it is one of the first VR projects to adapt social justice issue-driven, storytelling content to virtual reality technology and is featured in the MIT Docubase. Also, producing an accompanying VR project that uses 360° video and computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation to explore the film's themes of dehumanization and violence, this immersive media project is in development and offers users strategies for moving confidently through the racialized public spaces that black women navigate daily.