With the mayor’s refusal to prioritize recreation, John L. Smith pulled the community together to revive the city’s dilapidated pool in an effort to create inclusion with a swim program that eventually became the first team of color to win a state championship in the US.
LeRon Lee is a Newark, NJ native, filmmaker and educator. Lee’s work exhibits slices and adaptations of life, identity, new birth, and the ages of discovery. His short film, UGLY, was acquired by HBO and all its platforms. It was also featured in over 40 festivals, including a premiere at Cannes Film Festival and the HBO Short Film Competition as a finalist. He has six “Best Short Film” awards. His latest two-part short film, Catch A Girl, a project probing the development of predatory misogyny in male adolescents, has earned 3 “Best Director” awards and was recently acquired by PBS. The film has been used as an educational tool in classes at Dartmouth and other universities. His practice integrates teaching filmmaking as educational enrichment to incarcerated youth and individuals transitioning from prison. Lee is also the co-creator of The Newarkive, a boutique living multimedia archive that allows the sharing of images and connecting stories of Newarkers. He directed the Newarkive cannon documentary, Stingrays, the true story behind the birth of the Newark Swim Team, the first team of color to win a state championship in the United States. His latest directing credit is Faith Ringgold: American Story, a short documentary promo on the life and legacy of Faith Ringgold for The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
Yvonne Michelle Shirley is a director and producer of narrative and documentary films based in Newark, NJ. Her short film, Flowers, won Best Short Film in the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2016 American Black Film Festival. Her documentary short, Miasia: The Nature of Experience premiered at the 2017 BlackStar Film Festival. She produced the Sundance 2019 documentary short, Black 14, directed by Darius Clark Monroe and executive produced by Spike Lee. Yvonne has directed non-fiction work for New York Times’ T Magazine, Nike, AFROPUNK, and Topic. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list. She is a 2021 Impact Partners Documentary Producing Fellow. In Newark, Yvonne is Director of the Community Media Center at Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art. She is co-founder of The Newarkive, a digital archive initiative centering Newark’s Black communities. She is also a member of the film collective, New Negress Film Society.