Close to Home…
During her time as the Creative Strategist for
The Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Patrisse Cullors worked alongside the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative and filmmaker Whitney Skauge to bring to life Close to Home…, a short film documentary which illuminates the voices of young people navigating homelessness, advocacy, and chosen family.
Through intimate storytelling, the film confronts stereotypes about houselessness while uplifting the resilience, brilliance, and power of queer and systems impacted youth. The film focuses on the lives of four youth leaders at the LA Emissary, an organization founded in 2021 to inform funding, policy, and systems change within LA County to prevent and end youth homelessness through solutions driven and envisioned by young people with lived experience of homelessness.
The LA Emissary funds and supports a coalition of young people and invests in innovation toward the goal of transforming youth-serving systems to better meet their needs. Learn more at laemissary.org.
Close to Home is the Winner of Best Documentary at the 2025 LGBTQ+ Toronto & Los Angeles Film Festival, a Semi-Finalist at the 2025 Seattle Film Festival and received the Honorable Mention at the 2026 Chinatown International Film Festival.
“This film is a love letter to my younger queer self. Being a young queer houseless youth was painful, but I also was taken care of by chosen family. This film shares the struggle of young people, but also shares their passion for advocacy as they navigate the vulnerability of systems.
At a moment of growing crisis around youth homelessness and LGBTQ+ visibility, Close to Home provides a vital platform for young advocates and storytellers. The film invites audiences to look beyond failed systems and see the humanity and power of youth resilience.
—Patrisse Cullors
To host a local screening in your hometown, check out our resource guide for tips on utilizing the film to keep the conversation going.
They Are With Us
Our ancestors have always been with us. This work is about saying that out loud.
A two-channel 4K digital work I created, executive produced, and performed, filmed in Zihuatanejo, Mexico in July 2023. Directed by Maxwell Addae, with cinematography by Samudranil Chatterjee, They Are With Us moves between wide, open landscapes and close — very close — portraits of the body I am in. I appear in layered, flowing textiles I designed myself, wearing sculptural crowns created by KUTULA by Africana, adorned with cowrie shells. Through these gestures, I channel the presence and force of the òrìṣà — Yemaya, Obatala, Osun, and Oya. These are not performances of devotion. They are devotion. Hair, makeup, and spiritual garments are my own. Documentation by Whitney Skauge.
They Are With Us was part of Free Us, a larger body of work featured in The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond at the Fowler (October 29, 2023–February 7, 2024). That project brought together moving image, sound, and historical objects on altars — all of it oriented toward honoring òrìṣà practitioners and the continuity of their spiritual lineages across generations, across oceans, across everything that tried to sever the line.
This work does not look away from what tried to take these traditions from us. Christian hegemony and anti-African bias did not disappear. They are still operating. But our practices are still here too — and that is what the camera holds.
The Fowler Museum’s artist residency extends beyond the screen through a suite of educational resources designed for classrooms, community spaces, and independent study. These materials activate the project’s central inquiries, offering pathways for deeper engagement with Yoruba cosmologies, diasporic memory, and embodied knowledge. In this context, learning becomes a collective and generative act, one that supports cultural continuity and affirms the value of returning knowledge to the communities from which it emerges.
In partnership with \Vital Matters: Art, Devotion, Practice and co-Sponsored by the Center for Religion and Cities at Morgan State University — with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Nissan Foundation. Courtesy of Patrisse Cullors and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
Each òrìṣà in this work operates as both witness and mirror.
They Are With Us invites viewers into a space of reflection, into questions of belief, memory, and inheritance.
What has been obscured or displaced? What remains, waiting to be remembered? And what might it mean to reclaim the spiritual and cultural ground that has always been yours?
Let’s Do Things Different This Time
During Black History month I sat with Whitney Skauge, one of my favorite filmmakers, to share our thoughts more intimately. We had a conversation about what else is possible when all the other shit is not in the way.
I want so much more for us. I believe we can be so much more for us. We imagine a new world. And a new world will come to being. Sometimes we learn how to stand up for ourselves through small acts. It’s often these acts that build the foundation for how we fight.
What we are up against feels impossible. But it isn’t. Remember the small acts of defiance. They’ll guide you.
A film by Whitney Skauge in collaboration with Patrisse Cullors.
“We have a purpose here that is more than how we’re currently living”
— Patrisse Cullors
Abolitionist
Entertainment
Abolitionist Entertainment is where cinematic imagination meets collective liberation.
We are a studio of storytellers, cultural visionaries, and narrative disruptors crafting emotional, genre-bending stories that carry the heartbeat of resistance and the spirit of the future. Through emotionally resonant, visually arresting narratives, we unearth the truths of the past, illuminate the fight of the present, and conjure new worlds into being.
Abolitionist Entertainment sits at the nexus of independent cinema, cultural strategy, and liberation storytelling. We exist to disrupt the limits of mainstream narratives. Our work blends the spiritual with the political, the intimate with the epic, crafting stories that challenge power, honor community, and imagine worlds beyond the confines of the present.
Between The Warp and Weft: Weaving Shields of Strength and Spirituality, Charlie James Gallery, Photo by Yubo Dong; ofstudio
Between the Warp and Weft:
Weaving Shields of Strength and Spirituality
JUNE 15 - JULY 20, 2024
Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Rd
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Between The Warp and Weft: Weaving Shields of Strength and Spirituality, Charlie James Gallery, Photo by Yubo Dong; ofstudio
Between the Warp and the Weft is a deep and resonant exploration of Yoruba culture and the Ifá religion of which Cullors is a practitioner.
Fusing Malian mud cloth textiles, cowrie shells and metalwork to create what Cullors refers to as “a sanctuary of reflection and empowerment,” the core of the exhibition revolves around the sword of Oya, a spiritual emblem of power, protection and divine justice. Throughout Between the Warp and Weft, Oya's sword transcends its historical significance to address the pressing narrative of our times — the need for protection and reverence for Black women.
Cullors’ artistic practice, which is in part inspired by Los Angeles’ Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, invites the use of artworks as spiritual guardians, creating a legacy of creative offerings that exist beyond the visual plane and become both urgent cultural commentary and spiritual armor. To this end, Cullors has dedicated each piece in Between the Warp and Weft to a different Black woman in her life to whom she wants to extend protection.
“A lot of the work that I’ve done has been around the trauma of being Black in America, and also our resilience. We don't have the cultural right to protect ourselves … but what if we create spiritual objects of protection?”
—Patrisse Cullors
On the heels of her inclusion at the Fowler Museum of UCLA’s major exhibition exploring Yoruba sacred arts from Africa and beyond, Between the Warp and Weft is an invitation for viewers to traverse the paths of history and spirituality, to witness the interplay of power, divinity and artistry through the lens of Yoruba and African heritage.
The exhibition will be Cullors’ second showing at Charlie James Gallery. In 2023, she participated in a duo show with longtime collaborator noé olivas called Freedom Portals, in which she created tapestries of 12 of the 16 Odús, which are “books” — or signs and symbols — used for divination in Ifá. As part of her continuing artistic practice, Cullors intends to eventually make all 256 signs using vintage Malian mud cloth, metal, cowrie shells and etchings.
Artist2Artist
EMEL
Artist 2 Artist explores the power of artistic expression to create and empower change.
A2A serves as a unifying voice to the many influences that create the modern artist. On the first and third Tuesday each month, A2A welcomes best-selling authors, international journalists and renowned visual artists to celebrate the core of why they create, their impact on the world and the social inequities that their art often reflects.
SONGS FROM THE HOLE
LUMI TAN
JOJO ABOT
SHAHRZAD CHANGALVAEE
SHAHLA DORRIZ & ALEXANDRE ALI REZA DORRIZ
TRICIA ELAM WALKER
Abolition Is…
Abolition Is…, Vashon Center for the Arts, Photo by Lissett Lazo
An 8-week educational journey dedicated to creating thriving relationships, communities and societies.
It's Dangerous Times, We Have to be Connected, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Photo by Giovanni Solis
“As a Black woman who’s an artist, entrepreneur, author, writer, it’s always been an expectation that I shrink, that I only do one thing…so part of what I have wanted to live out loud is that I’m a full human being that is very interested in the fullness of our humanity and the ways that we can access freedom.”
Don't Disappear Us/Keep us Leaping/Low Riders and Bonnets that Heal, The Broad, Photo by Giovanni Solis
It's Dangerous Times, We Have to be Connected, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Photo by Giovanni Solis
“I believe that the way we access freedom is by practicing freedom — and the way I practice freedom is by doing all the things that move me to create.”
Malcolm Revisited, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Still/video by Satta
North Star Project: Healing Generations, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Photo by alexandre ali-reza dorriz
North Star Project: Healing Generations, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Photo by alexandre ali-reza dorriz
“I see my works as spiritual objects that I’m offering to the public, almost like going back to the objects of our people. They were sacred objects that were, and still are, helping us with the alchemy of our time.”
Knots, FORM Festival, Still/video by Allan De Leon
“Patrisse Cullors creates an online MFA program to develop new artist-activists” / Los Angeles Times / Makeda Easter
abolitionist pod (prototype), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Photo by Giovanni Solis
Good Trouble, 2019
They Are With Us, Executive Producer
Film for the Fowler Museum, The House Was Too Small exhibition
2023
Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground, Executive Producer
Documentary
2021
Malcolm Revisited, Executive Producer
Film commissioned by REDCAT
2020
Good Trouble, Executive Producer
TV Series
Light on a Path, Follow, Executive Producer
Short Film
Outdooring, Executive Producer
Short Film
2019
Resist, Executive Producer
YouTube Originals TV Series Documentary