Jody Stillwater 周青海 is a writer, director, and creative technologist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics and archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation, and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation, and narrative cinema.
Stillwater is a co-founder of Yanasa Creative Group. He is a finalist for the SFFILM Kenneth Rainin Screenwriting Grant and has screened his films at the De Young Museum, YBCA, Mutek, ISEA 2019 South Korea, Marfa Film Festival, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival in Barcelona, Rockefeller’s Imagine Science Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, and Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival. He has also directed films for Meta/Facebook, Google, Knotel, Bentley Mills, as well as performed and installed multiple new media projects at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab (incorporating film + technology), and the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab (built around choreography + film). He appeared as a featured guest on Asian Pacific America with Robert Handa on NBC and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018. He has received grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Fleischhacker Foundations.
Stillwater is also a location sound recordist who has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Sound Mixing. Films he has recorded have screened at Sundance, Edinburgh Film Festival, SXSW, Chicago International, Tribeca, and SFIFF. He has made films in the Netherlands, Colombia, Austria, India, Chile, Slovenia, the UK, and across the United States.
