Karen Marks

Karen Marks is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, multimedia journalist and communications strategist with over 15 years of experience leading storytelling and strategy across the fields of media and international development. She has lead productions from conception through delivery, designing narratives that amplify underrepresented voices and deliver measurable impact.
As a journalist and filmmaker, Karen has directed, produced, and written both feature length and short documentaries, as well as social media and Youtube videos. Her work explores themes of resilience, justice, economic equity, spirituality, healing, creativity and the enduring legacies of history, blending journalistic rigor with an artist’s eye. Her short documentary Growing Together which was commissioned by Al Jazeera’s WITNESS series was broadcast and streamed in 100 countries in 2024. It follows a family of former members of MOVE, the radical revolutionary group of Philadelphia, Mike Africa Jr. as he reunites with his parents after they each served forty years of a prison sentence and remarry. She directed and produced The Price of Memory, an unflinching look at Jamaica’s slavery reparations movement and the legacy of slavery in Britain, told through the lens of a small group of Rastafarians who petition Queen Elizabeth II for reparations on her last visit to the island. She produced and wrote Shungu: The Resilience of a People, which captures the lives of ordinary people in Zimbabwe during unprecedented political and economic crisis, the highest inflation in history. Her films have premiered at major festivals including IDFA, BFI London, FESPACO. Shungu secured international broadcasts, screened at film festivals in Africa, Europe and North America, and won the Ousmane Sembene Award at Zanzibar Film Festival. She was commissioned by the National Association of Black Journalists to direct her short documentary HOME, about deed theft in Brooklyn, New York. It streamed on BlackStarNews.com.
Earlier in her career, she produced lifestyle news stories that aired on CBS Early Show and NBC’s Today Show, as well as video news of New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week. She also worked at the intersection of online content and TV at Court TV.com.
Karen has a few documentary projects in progress. She is currently in post-production on GAAMAA, a feature-length documentary about Gloria “Mama G” Simms, a ground-breaking Jamaican woman artist and Maroon leader. Her feature documentary On the Parkway (supported by the prestigious ITVS Humanities Documentary Fellowship), chronicles the revival of Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Carnival after the COVID-19 pandemic. She is in production on a documentary, Queen Mother of Harlem about deed theft and mortgage fraud in gentrifying Harlem, through the story of an 84 year-old social justice leader who is fighting to preserve the home she created for vulnerable single mothers with children.
Alongside her journalism and filmmaking career, Karen has a significant portfolio in communications leadership. She was a Senior Consulting Officer at JAMPRO / Jamaica Film Commission, the country’s trade and investment agency. She managed multi-million dollar investment projects in Jamaica’s creative industries, designed multi-country marketing strategies to promote Jamaica as a film destination, and developed campaigns to spotlight local content and music. She ran Jamaica Film Commission for six months during a leadership transition. She has collaborated with international organizations such as the World Bank and CARICOM, produced communications materials and reports. More recently, she has done client work for US-based nonprofits and organizations.
Karen holds a BA in Journalism from NYU and a Master’s in International Development from Tulane University Law School. She was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and she is based in New York City. She is writing a book, a family memoir, about the run up to the 1980 election in Jamaica when Prime Minister Michael Manley pursued a policy of democratic socialism and friendship with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. This angered the US government and thrust the country in the headwinds of the Cold War, as the US backed his political opposition, Edward Seaga.
Karen’s work has brought her to 21 countries and she has filmed on location in the US, UK, South America, the Caribbean, West Africa and Southern Africa. As a filmmaker and a professional who studied development, as well spent a decade researching slavery reparations, Karen has screened and presented her work at conferences and universities. She gave the film plenary lecture at Caribbean Studies Association’s annual conference in New Orleans 2014 and participated on a panel in Haiti in 2015. She has been an invited speaker at universities including The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, University of Rochester, Howard University, Morgan State University, Wellesley College, Smith College, Boston University Art Galleries.