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Maisha Era
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School of Film, Media & Theatre
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ATLANTA— As the College of the Arts celebrates its creatives during this week’s 2025 Spring Commencement, the School of Film, Media & Theatre takes a moment to connect with Deena Ramadan, an M.F.A. film candidate, about what attracted her to the film program, dream career, thesis film, and her plans moving forward.
Who is Deena Ramadan?
I am an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. The main artistic mediums that I explore include digital and analog photography, videography and analog filmmaking. My storytelling is rooted in my identity as a queer Black woman and a second-generation Muslim immigrant working to amplify the voices of women of color, the queer community and the African diaspora through my artistry.
How did you decide on Georgia State University?
I chose Georgia State University for the fully funded M.F.A. in Digital Filmmaking program that the School of Film, Media & Theatre started in 2022. I am part of the first cohort to graduate from the program since its launch in fall 2022. GSU’s location in Downtown Atlanta also drew me to the school for the strong sense of culture and diversity here in Atlanta.
Tell me about your dream career.
One of my biggest goals is to start a production company that supports queer women and nonbinary people of color as filmmakers, storytellers and artists. This is a long-term goal for me, as I want to establish an inclusive production studio that can create impactful work that challenges the typical major studio conventions and exclusionary practices. My dream career is to work as someone who uplifts others and helps to break down the door that gatekeepers in the film industry have set up.
Tell me about your film "What the Water Gave Me."
In my graduate thesis film “What the Water Gave Me” water acts a site of counter-cultural formation, where communities of predominantly Black and Brown women and people of color, who have been marginalized within modern mermaid culture, gather and create new systems of representation, form new inclusive ideologies meant to disrupt the gate kept subculture of mermaiding and use their bodies as resistance within this “culture of survival.” While the film itself now acts as a memory, it also actively explores how bodies of water, and the bodies of people of color, can hold cultural, historical and emotional memory. The merpeople of “What the Water Gave Me” remind us that memory acts as a site of cultural resistance against dominant ideologies and creates a space where new kinds of societies have the potential to be formed, societies that uplift each other through community care and radical love. This cultural formation is built upon a strong sense of inclusive community forged through connection to the water and each other. These Mers have developed a new visual and oral language that is self-determined and rooted in reconnecting the image and history of the mermaid to its most original basis within African and African diasporic cosmologies, cultures, religions and history. “What the Water Gave Me” imagines what the future implications of this cultural formation and recollection of memory could mean for the advancement of a media-based cultural revolution that may ultimately create a new kind of more equitable and radically inclusive society, one in which truly anyone can be a mermaid.
What are your next steps after graduation?
I am going to celebrate, rejoice and relax! After a 3-year-long graduate program, I have so many skills that I am so excited to refine even more within my career. I plan to explore all the options available to me. My main interests within the film industry are jobs on-set working with the camera team as 1st or 2nd AC, film loader, still photographer, camera operator, cinematographer and director of photography! I also want to bring my storytelling as a documentarian to the non-profit and mutual aid world to help tell those untold stories from our communities that matter most. Catch my thesis film “What the Water Gave Me” screening around the world and here in Atlanta over the coming months!