Kelly Daniela Norris

Kelly Daniela Norris (pictured left) is a Mexican-American director, writer, and editor. She shot her first feature, Sombras de Azul (Shades of Blue), on-location in Cuba, weaving together memory, travelogue, and narrative as a tribute to her late brother. Sombras de Azul premiered at the Austin Film Festival, winning the Audience Award in its category. Her 2nd feature Nakom was shot on-location in a remote farming village in northeastern Ghana. Nakom premiered at Berlinale in 2016 and was nominated for the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes'Award at the 2017 Independent Spirit Awards. Norris graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Psychology. She taught courses in avant-garde cinema and film history in the Film and Media Department at the University of California Berkeley during her time as a Ph.D. candidate, as well as presented her research on early stuntwomen of the 1910s at the Austin Film Society.

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ABOUT BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE

Inspired by the foundational text of queer ecology, Biological Exuberance celebrates the diversity of gender and sexuality in nature and exposes its history of suppression by the scientific community. The film follows a sect of pioneering biologists, alongside current ecologists, to track the expansive evidence of same-sex sexuality and transgender behavior as it exists in the natural world, debunking the hegemonic and oppressive notion of queer sexuality as being a human-specific phenomenon existing outside of, as opposed to within, the natural biological world.

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