M-TOWN
M Town is a contemporary portrait of Memphis and the surrounding edges of Arkansas and Mississippi—the area where I was raised, shaped by, and continue to interrogate. Historically, the city sits on land stolen from the Chickasaw and Cherokee Nations. The Trail of Tears passed in front of my childhood home. Memphis grew into the world’s largest spot cotton market—an economy built on the forced labor of enslaved African Americans. Its soil holds centuries of violence.
This place was also a flashpoint for Civil Rights struggle. It’s where Black sanitation workers marched for dignity, and where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That legacy is not past tense. It lingers in the atmosphere, in the economy, the often racially separated neighborhoods and the lives of those still here.
M Town maps a psychological terrain shaped by contradiction: cultural richness and disparity, humor and threat. There’s a stillness to some scenes, but it’s not peaceful—it’s the kind of stillness before something happens. It’s about what it feels like to live in a place that marks you without your immediate knowledge. A place that loves and wounds at once.
This work isn’t nostalgic. It’s a reckoning. And an offering back.
