by Joneka Percentie I’m leaving the country for the first time this weekend and I am a mess in every sense of the word. These last few days before my departure I’ve felt a strange combination of anxiety, excitement, and confusion. I’m getting on a plane flying across the equator and landing in the southern…
by Joneka Percentie SPARK’s ongoing Black Women Create project highlights Black women working to create complex characters and fighting limited representation in the film and television industries through writing, directing, and producing. That’s why I was so excited to come across this tumblr called Black Women Directors, which has the same mission. Black Women Directors…
by Celeste Montaño and Joneka Percentie When the CW released its first look at Jane the Virgin back in July, everyone in SPARK was on the fence about it. The trailer’s tone was intriguing, but a show that revolves entirely around a Latina woman’s sex life—or lack, thereof? Less intriguing, more off-putting. Turns out, we…
#WomenOnTheMap by Joneka Percentie, Katy Ma & Aviv Rau SPARK: Women On The Map For the past year, we’ve been quietly working on a project that we’re thrilled to finally announce! SPARK has teamed up with Google to put Women On The Map so that wherever you are in the world, you can be alerted…
by Joneka Percentie It’s December, which means Oscar predictions are starting and there’s an unsettling and undeniable trend. Some top contenders include Wild (white woman in the wilderness), Exodus: God and Kings (white men and women as Egyptian royalty), Interstellar (white astronauts in space), Gone Girl (psycho white people), Birdman (white people in a play),…
by Montgomery Jones and Joneka Percentie In 2012, I won a TV competition to interview the cast of The Hunger Games at the world premiere in Los Angeles, and that’s when I met Amandla Stenberg. She was a 13 year old that looked younger than she was and I was an 18 year old that…
by Joneka Percentie I began my research simply. I rephrased the key search words several times: Black women and eating disorders, eating disorders and Black women, disordered eating among Black women. Each search yielded few results. Very little research has been done on Black women and eating disorders. With hardly any statistics specifically about Black…
by Joneka Percentie YouTube has become a treasure chest of funny and smart web series starring Black women, and among the jewels is Pursuit of Sexiness by UCBComedy and Deverge. Pursuit of Sexiness follows friends Nicky and Sheer, and their adventures in New York, including dating, thrift shopping, and dancing on the subway. Nicole Byer,…