Jonee' Ansa

Jonee' Ansa is a graduate and two-year Director of Photography Fellow of AFI, the prestigious film conservatory in Los Angeles, California.  There, Ansa studied: --   Cinematography under Harry Wolfe ("Gone With the Wind" and "The Beverly Hillbillies") and Thomas Denove' ("Star Trek: The Next Generation,"  "A Time to Kill" and  "The Crystal Eye") --   Directing under Daniel Petrie ("A Raisin in the Sun," "Fort Apache the Bronx," "Cocoon," "Cocoon: The Return" and "Bad Boys") and Dezso Magyar, director of the Center for the Advanced Film and Television Studies at AFI ("Streets of Gold" and "No Secret") --   Screenwriting with Leonardo Bercovici ("The Bishop's Wife" and "Last Moments") and --   Production Design from Robert Boyle, legendary director Alfred Hitchcock's production designer ("Saboteur," "Shadows of Doubt," "North by Northwest," "The Birds" and "In Cold Blood").     Ansa also attended workshops conducted by Robert Wise, the film editor for Orson Welles' classic films "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons" and by George Stevens Jr., founding director of The American Film Institute.     During his time at the conservatory, Ansa was an innovator in working with the Women's Directors Program at AFI. While working with such legendary cinematographers as Vilos Zsigmond and Theo Van de Sante as well as with emerging filmmakers, Ansa created his own person style while honing his craft as director of photography and film editor.     His career in the broadcast industry began in the late 1970s at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, Georgia where, as a television cameraman, he was among the last generation of news photographers who shot film as well as video for the news department. He also worked as a TV news cameraman for WTLV-TV in Jacksonville, Florida before moving on to award-winning documentary work for the Westinghouse station WQIA-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina in the 1980s. A stint as news videographer at WBAL-TV in Baltimore, Maryland followed.     He has worked as filmmaker on music videos for Stevie Wonder, Bobby Brown, En Vogue, Heavy D, Kirk Frankin, Yolanda Adams, Donnie McKurkin, Joni Mitchell, and Janet Jackson. (And many more Music Video) As well as  commercials and industrial films for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia.     His background in theater includes study at The Julliard School and The New School of Social Research in New York City and Webster College in St. Louis, Missouri and teaching master workshops at Missouri and Arkansas colleges as well as at Clark College in the Atlanta University Center during 1970s. These studies and work led to his acceptance at AFI and to fulfilling his life-long desire shoot and direct feature films.   Also a Percussionist, African/Brazilian/Indianian instruments    

In the early 1990s, Jonee' Ansa scuba dove in black waters off the coast of Georgia and was part of a team that excavated centuries-old sloth fossils and shot a documentary on the excavation for Fernbank Museum in Atlanta. He has also done diving for sunken gold and treasures in waters of f the coast of Florida. (NOTE: See WALKING ON WATER: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Randall Kenan, pub. By Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999)