DÉWI sungai MARQUIS-HOUSTON
Déwi (dae-wee) is a mixed-race Native Bornean and independent film director and editor based in Louisville, Colorado. She was born in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1978, to a young Indonesian birthmother who named her Dewi, and descends from Orang Banjar, Dayak, and Sunda to whom she attributes her Indigenous worldview; and an English birthfather to whom she attributes her lighter-skinned privilege. She was adopted as an infant by white, middle-class American parents who named her Amy, loved her deeply, and raised her in Lexington, Kentucky, with multiple journeys back to Southeast Asia for her father's work as a geographer and academic. As far back as she can remember, she’s seen the world through cinematic eyes, made sense of her life through music, and found truth outside of the mainstream.
After graduating with a journalism degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Déwi's love of nature and story led her to Washington, D.C., in 2000, where she edited magazines for conservation nonprofits. In 2011, she made her first two documentaries in Yosemite National Park, and two years later, dove into filmmaking full time. Having spent years observing a conservation movement that's disproportionately white, she founded and co-directed the National Park Experience film series, amplifying BIPOC narratives in the outdoors via documentary films— including her first feature— that appeared in national parks, film festivals, and on PBS and nationalgeographic.com. She has since dedicated her career to narrative correction, using the camera to center Indigenous voices and break from dominant settler storytelling and colonial worldviews.
Déwi's short film, ARA, UNTAMED, is a personal account of her racial awakening, triggered by the Black Lives Matter uprising in the Summer of 2020, and her struggle to engage her then-7-year-old daughter as she transitioned from blending to dissenting in their white suburban community. She and her life+creative partner, Jason Houston, are also in production on an experimental body of work that explores Indigeneity lost, then reclaimed, as Déwi and other transracial adoptees break from their white communities and reconnect with ancestral stories, language, ceremony, and culture in an urgent call to address the climate crisis facing humanity. This project was the focus of her recent fellowship at Cine Fe.
Déwi has directed, cast, produced, filmed, and edited for a wide range of clients, including the BBC, The Discovery Channel, Exposure Labs, ProPublica, and nonprofit organizations like Rare. She is a proud member of the Asian American Documentary Network, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Cine Fe, Film Fatales, and Kin Theory. She loves collaborating on Indigenous-led film projects that uphold sovereignty both on and off camera, and push the creative boundaries of documentary.
Déwi's work has been supported by generous individuals, foundations, nonprofit organizations, production companies, media outlets, and brands. In addition to filmmaking, she also serves as a mentor, story consultant, workshop coach, guest instructor, festival programmer, festival juror, and panelist, with guest appearances ranging from Costa Rica to Yale.
Jason Houston
Jason’s work explores how we live on the planet and with each other, considering environmental conservation, social justice, and indigenous thinking in the human experience. Jason brings his photojournalistic sensibilities to eight16’s authentic, flowing, and natural verité approach to filmmaking.
Most of Jason’s career has been as an independent freelance still photographer also working in short film funded through grants and commissioned assignments with magazines and NGOs. His work has taken him to over 35 countries—many of them many times, sometimes traveling abroad over 200 days a year—where his approach is to embed with the communities he’s working with (often using various participatory methods), to produce stories that transcend the outsiders’ preconceptions and assumptions, positioning those he photographs as authors and collaborators rather than subjects.
The resulting stories have been published, exhibited, premiered, screened, and presented around the world in outlets and venues ranging from The New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Science Magazine, and The Nature Conservancy, to Mountainfilm, SxSW, Harvard, Yale, Duke, the New Mexico Museum of Art, The UNESCO House Paris, San Francisco Art Institute, and USAID.
In addition to their film work, Jason has been working on a long-term, on-going multimedia project, LAST WILDEST PLACE, exploring indigenous sovereignty in the most remote Upper Amazon in Southeastern Peru. Together, Jason and Dewi are also actively working on a series of participatory photography projects in various locations including with a Saan community in northern Namibia, in the Mexican mangroves on both coasts, in Philippines, Madagascar, and Peru, plus several projects in Colorado.
As an advocate for Concerned Photography done right, Jason has also presented, curated, run workshops, served on boards, and organized conference programming on cause-driven media for dozens of arts and other institutions including Anderson Ranch, Duke University, WWF, Wake Forest University, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Telluride Photo Festival, Wild & Scenic Film Festival, University of Colorado at Boulder, LensCulture, San Francisco Art Institute, Mountainfilm, EnPAx, Adventure Film Festival, and Blue Earth’s annual Collaborations for Cause conference.
For more than 8 years in the early 2000’s Jason also worked as Photo Editor for Orion magazine, where he led assignments, story development, and art direction for photo essays, portfolios, features, and departments. Jason is a grateful alumnus of the Missouri Photo Workshop; a Senior Fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers; a Fellow at Wake Forest University’s Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability; and the 2022 Environmental Peacebuilding (EnPAX) Arts Fellow.
Déwi and Jason discussing film and art, with hard kombuchas, in Fort Collins, CO. © Ryan Waneka / HIFFCO
