VICE PRESIDENT
Mezan Ayoka is a Jamaican writer and filmmaker who attended the Los Angeles Film School. She has written and directed short films, including Nine Night, Ding, Grow Jamaica Grow, and Going Down and has worked in advertising and local TV. Her short film Going Down, is a 2018 JAFTA Propella! grant awardee and premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film festival (2018). Going Down has been an official selection at the Demakijaz Film Festival in Lublin, Poland, San Francisco Black Film Festival, California, USA; Denton Black Film Festival in Texas, USA; Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival in Baltimore, USA; Rapport Festival in Brixton, UK; Women’s International Film and Arts Festival in New York, USA; and Hairouna Film Festival in Bequia Island, St.Vincent. Her TV pilot Watari Vale was a winner in the inaugural JAFTA/Porter Screenwriting Fellowship (2020). Her feature length screenplay Bluefields was a semifinalist in the Screencraft Screenwriters Residency Program (2017) and was a winner of the ReelJamaica Film Lab pitch competition. A Calabash International Literary Fund Fellow, her poetry has been published in The Caribbean Writer, POUI, Susumba’s Book Bag, Firestick, The Jamaica Observer’s Bookends and On The Dark Path: An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry. Her poem Under the House was the recipient of the 2018 David Hugh Literary Prize.
She is the founder and owner of Ayzha Productions – a media production company that aims to produce and distribute films and TV shows that showcase different sides of Jamaican life. Mezan also offers script notes and coverage to scripts in the development and pre-production phases.