Contessa Gayles is an award-winning film director, writer, DP, editor and an Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movement, healing, Black liberation and the radical imagination.

Contessa’s award-winning feature documentary-visual album, Songs from the Hole, world premiered at SXSW 2024, where it won the Audience Award, Visions category. She premiered The Debutantes at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in documentary competition. Her documentary short, Founder Girls, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on BET.

Contessa’s work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, Artemis Rising Foundation, the International Documentary Association, Sundance Institute, California Arts Council, DeNovo Initiative, Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective, and others. She was an SFFILM filmmaker in residence and has been awarded fellowships with the Film Independent/Netflix Amplifier fellowship, the Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMaker fellowship, the Firelight Documentary Lab, the Chicken & Egg (Egg)celerator Lab and the Open Society Foundations Soros Justice fellowship.

Previously, she was on staff at CNN, where she directed, produced, shot and edited award-winning original series and documentaries, including the feature documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, shorts; Women Who March, Women Who March: The Movement, and series including; This Is Birth with Lisa Ling and the 2016 News & Documentary Emmy-nominated Feeding America's Most Vulnerable Children.