Biography

Avant-garde video-maker and film theorist (Givens) grew up in Farmington Hills, MI USA; born 1/3/1992.

Givens, a lifelong learner of Cinema has enjoyed theatre since attending summer camps as a child at the Marquis Theatre in downtown Northville, MI. In seventh grade, Givens came to terms with her gender identity but kept it a secret until the age of twenty-five.

In 2014, Givens debut feature "Futility" premiered for the Cinema Department faculty at Binghamton University as her Senior Thesis project. Givens was soon awarded Honors in Cinema for her work upon graduation. Givens chose not to walk at her own graduation due to the bullying she faced from classmates during her last two years at school. The treatment from her peers is something she addresses in monologues of the film as it was interfering with the completion of the production. The stress of these events eventually led to Givens' first psychiatric hospitalization five months after graduation.

The film "Futility" (2014) is based off of Givens' teenage life as a lifeguard (swimmer) and highlights the transition of her swimming career ending, to her filmmaking career beginning. The film examines such themes as loss/gain of innocence, the dialectic of good & evil, and self-actualization/self-acceptance. The film later screened in 2015 at the Student Cuts International Film Festival in Slovenia. And later in 2016, at the Mediawave International Art & Music Festival in Hungary. On May 12th, 2024 Givens celebrated the ten year anniversary of "Futility" with a re-release cut of the film that included edited credits and scoring changes.

Givens has garnered recent success with her film "Agility (..or something like it)" which made its in-person debut and North American Premiere at the Urban Arts Festival in Dallas, Texas on August, 11th 2023. "Agility..." was Winner of Best Experimental Film at the Ideal International Film Festival (India) 2023 and Best Experimental Short Film at the Bettiah International Film Festival (India) 2024.

"Agility...", is the second film of the Healing Trilogy. The film is actually a short adaptation of a feature film script Givens began writing in the fall of 2014. The film highlights themes from Edouard Glissant's (Poetics of Relations) such as the rhizome and opacity, but instead of detailing the African diaspora Givens focuses on the "inner-diaspora" of her characters journey.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous