Selena A. Burks, Film Maker/Motivational Speaker
Selena earned her BFA from Wright State University in 2003. With a fellowship grant from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, she completed Saving Jackie in June 2004. Selena formed S.A. Burks Productions shortly after the film’s completion and has presented Saving Jackie to a variety of drug outreach programs, state and county child service organizations as well as high schools and universities. Saving Jackie premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and has been shown at other film festivals nationwide. In April 2005, Selena was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship for her work with Saving Jackie.
“S.A. Burks’ engaging and warm personality, and her ability to articulate her painful childhood, connects her to her audience. People who hear her speak are amazed with her strength and ability to survive the unthinkable. Her film reveals an intimate portrait of her sister and her mother and gives the viewer a window into a world that we never hear about.”
-Dr. Meera Rastogi, Psychology, Edgewood University
In July 2005, Selena co-directed a documentary short titled The True Body Project, a film that follows 13 teenage girls through a creative writing and physical fitness program that leads the girls through the process of self-discovery and challenges the girls to identify with their bodies. This film premiered at the 2006 Cleveland International Film Festival.
In March 2006, Selena was one of 22 artists awarded the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship Grant for her next feature film Fuse. This project melds fiction and documentary to tell the story of a young woman’s erratic teenage years as a runaway; it is based on the life of Selena’s foster sister.
To gain more experience working on independent feature films, Selena moved to Shreveport, LA in 2008. There, she worked on the film crew of Oliver Stone’s highly anticipated bio-pic of George W. Bush entitled “W”. After production ended, Selena moved back to Ohio to focus on developing her film projects and to return to public speaking. The latest project that Selena is exploring is a narrative feature that reveals the poignant events at the heart of Saving Jackie with the working title Mother’s Keeper.
Where Saving Jackie inspires, Mother’s Keeper grieves. The story centers on the loss of childhood innocence and a daughter who is thrust into a maternal role over her younger sister and her crack-addicted mother. Pushed past the limits of neglect and poverty, the oldest daughter claws her way out of a miserable home life, taking her sister with her. This act of revolt sets up a chain of events that leads the two sisters to an improved but still uncertain life in foster care.
Selena currently lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband.
