Colleen Thurston

Colleen Thurston is a Choctaw filmmaker, educator and film curator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Grounding her filmmaking practice in place-based narratives and Indigenous world views, her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide. She has created film and video work for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, and museums, public television, and federal and tribal organizations and been supported by Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, the Ford Foundation, the Redford Center, Creative Capital and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
Colleen’s first feature documentary Drowned Land (2025) examines the cycle of displacement as it is related to resource extraction in her tribe, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. It is currently being distributed on PBS by Reel South.
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In addition to her production work, Colleen is a​ programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, MountainFilm, Tacoma Film Festival and Indian Territory Film Festival​. She is the project producer for the Indigenous film series and artist support program, Native Lens, and co-creator of Kinship Frame, a Black and Indigenous intersectional film curatorial project hosted at Dreamland Tulsa.

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‍About Untitled Freedmen Film

Untitled Freedmen Film uncovers the history of the formerly enslaved people of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.