Naima works to tell stories of transformation and understated bravery by rendering the juxtaposition of psycho-spiritual realities we cannot see alongside the normalized brutalities “hiding” in everyday life. Their first short, AND NOTHING HAPPENED, explored the psychological aftermath of a sexual assault and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival. It is now a part of the Criterion Collection. Their second short, PIU PIU, a meditation on frontier justice and victimhood ontology, premiered at Blackstar Film Festival in 2018.
In 2017, Naima became a Sundance Institute Screenwriter Intensive Fellow. In 2018, they wrote, directed, acted in, and edited for the Peabody Award-winning Random Acts of Flyness (HBO). In 2019, Naima directed a pilot for Showtime executive produced by Lena Waithe.
In 2020, as part of a multimedia installation produced by Aljazeera Contrast, they wrote and directed a STILL HERE – a virtual reality experience about the obstacles Black women face when re-entering society after being kidnapped and traumatized by the prison industrial complex. It premiered in the New Frontiers section of the Sundance Film Festival.
Naima is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and is currently in the woods developing several projects in the docu-narrative hybrid space that center BIPOC femmes taking back their power after surviving hierarchical abuses internalized by the dominant social order of white and masculine supremacy.
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