Jon-Sesrie Goff
Program Officer, Creativity and Free Expression
Jon-Sesrie Goff is part of the Creativity and Free Expression team and makes grants globally in documentary film, new media, and visual storytelling for the foundation’s JustFilms program.
As an accomplished multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator, he brings a wide range of experience to Ford after serving as executive director of the Flaherty Film Seminar and creating the inaugural film program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture. His body of work includes extensive institutional, community, and family archival research, visual documentation, and oral history interviews in the coastal South on the legacy of Black land ownership and Gullah Geechee heritage preservation. Jon engages with his work from the paradigm of a social change instigator.
He studied sociology, economics, and theater at Morehouse College, completed his BA at The New School, along with an MFA from Duke University in experimental and documentary arts. Jon’s work as an educator includes Duke University, Villanova University, and West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and his grantmaking and jury panel work span the National Endowment for the Arts, Tribeca Film Institute, the International Documentary Association, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Blackstar Film Festival, Oberhausen Seminar, and CinemAfrica Film Festival among others.