Writer | Researcher | Consultant
With a background in acting (Broadway and TV), a Master of Arts in Social Justice & Community Organizing (Prescott College), and current pursuits toward a second Master of Arts in Cinema & Media Studies (USC), Marisa Diane Kennedy heals through storytelling and consulting by applying an activist perspective to her work.
At it’s core, it’s all about healing.
Marisa has two shows in development.
RUBY JEAN is a story of self-discovery wrapped in the unique shell of late-blooming queerness and polyamory, transmitted via a 30-minute dramedy.
Ruby Jean is a fat, Black, photographer whose previously stalled photography career takes off along with her love life when her and her boyfriend decide to open their relationship and explore outside love interests.
A brilliant but ostracized Black academic returns to Los Angeles after her father’s death, only to discover her rival teaching on campus. As she struggles to rebuild her reputation, the pressures of surveillance and campus politics tighten around her, fueling a paranoia that pushes her toward violent extremes.
Academic Research
In November 2023, Marisa’s research included determining how intersectionality, misogynoir, and anti-Blackness contribute to the delegitimization of Black women activists. Specifically, looking at how these frameworks influence culture via film and TV and how that impacts Black women and femme activists’ representation in the press. Her article The Soil That Nourishes Our Growth: Effects of Delegitimization on Black Women Activists was published in the Journal of Sustainability Education’s special Community Engaged Critical Research issue in December 2024.
Marisa’s current research looks at changes in Black people’s desire for visibility by considering historical calls for recognition and justice alongside televisual depictions of surveillance. She is also interested in “rememory” in Afrofuturist storytelling that uses historical moments of collective trauma to catalyze communal and ancestral healing.
Represent: Reclaiming Black Narratives in Media
Marisa is recording a podcast that utilizes her years of experience as a Black person in the media industry to examine how intersections of identity that converge with Blackness are represented in TV/film.
In Season 1, Marisa focuses on Black women and femmes. She uses her master’s research of Black feminism, narrative theory, and cultivation theory to examine how and why Black women and femmes are represented in scripted media in harmful and inauthentic ways.
Marisa pulls in industry heavy hitters to weigh in on their perspectives as Black women within the media landscape and to also discuss their experiences as media consumers and Black women navigating a world in which these representations impact their daily lives.
