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Katie Jefferis

HAND, HEAD & HEART

Excerpt from pilot episode of Black Mountain, a historical miniseries.

By Katie Jefferis

SYNOPSIS

Black Mountain is an hour-long historical mini-series about the experimental arts college that operated between 1933 and 1957 in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina. The series follows a fictional protagonist, Helaine DeWitt, a young potter from Indiana who runs away to Black Mountain to find the discipline, intensity, and independence needed to thrive as a working woman artist in the 1940s. As Helaine struggles to embrace her talents, discover her courage, and negotiate emotional and academic betrayals, the backdrop of the unorthodox school serves to illustrate how alternative ways of living and learning, though marginalized, can be meaningful. By exploring how Black Mountain College was ahead of its time in its tolerant approach to race and sexuality, and how it became an incubator for the American avant-garde, the series shows that strong-willed, opinionated individuals can come together to permanently alter culture and history. The series focuses on the untold stories of the women who shaped the school’s culture, women who challenged the status quo through their work but existed in the shadows of the famous men who wrote the school’s history.

Also by this author:

Mother of the World (feature)

In a future matriarchal society where men are valued only for their procreative abilities, a woman must fight to rescue her abducted son.

 

Pancakes for One (feature)

When an uptight anthropologist inherits a clown college from a father she never knew, she tries to study the clowns in an ethnography but is mistaken for a new student and forced to find her inner clown while coming to terms with her true self.

 

Alice (feature)

A bio-pic of expressionist portrait painter Alice Neel.

 

CONTACT

Email
katiejefferis@gmail.com

Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/katiagotcha