Songs from the Hole

Contessa Gayles is a non-fiction film director, DP, editor and an Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movement, healing, Black liberation and radical imagination. Contessa’s feature-length documentary visual album, Songs from the Hole, world premiered at SXSW 2024, where it won the Audience Award, Visions category. Her documentary short, Founder Girls (Exec. Producer Queen Latifah), premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on BET. Her work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, Artemis Rising Foundation, the International Documentary Association, the California Arts Council, the DeNovo Initiative, and Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective. She was an SFFILM filmmaker in residence and has been awarded fellowships with the Film Independent/Netflix Amplifier fellowship, the Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMaker fellowship, the Firelight Documentary Lab, the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Lab and the Open Society Foundations Soros Justice fellowship. Previously, she was a producer at CNN, where she created, directed, produced, shot and edited award-winning original series and documentaries, including the feature documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, shorts; Women Who March and Women Who March: the Movement, and series including; This Is Birth with Lisa Ling and the 2016 News & Documentary Emmy-nominated Feeding America's Most Vulnerable Children.