Professor of Theater and Africana Studies Justin Emeka, OC ’95, has been a theater director for most of his professional career, but has recently turned to filmmaking. His newest documentary short, “Songs of Black Folk” — co-directed by 2025 Emmy nominee Haley Watson — premiered at the Tribeca Festival this summer. The short focuses on the inception of and inspiration behind the titular event, a celebration of Black music throughout U.S. history that has annually commemorated Juneteenth in the Seattle area since 2022. It has received significant acclaim and is being considered as a potential shortlister for the Documentary Short Film 2026 Academy Award. It is available to stream for free on PBS.
Emeka’s next project is a reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House in 1950s Black, middle-class New Jersey; it will premiere at the Two River Theater next February. He is collaborating with Caylen Bryant, OC ’17, who is composing music for and acting in the play.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get involved with the documentary project?
I was making a film at the time called BIOLOGICAL. My then-cinematographer, Haley Watson, got invited to document this concert that was happening in Seattle, Songs of Black Folk. She was so moved by their story and by the work that they were doing that she came back and invited me to join because they were dealing with material she wasn’t all the way familiar with. She asked me to help her figure out what the story was, what we might focus on.
How did the two of you meet?
When I was working on BIOLOGICAL, I hired some producers, and they recommended Haley. We collaborated well and moved right into Songs of Black Folk. Because of my history with the Pacific Northwest, Seattle is one of my creative homes — a lot of my work is about shining a light on Black culture in spaces you don’t expect to find it. So the project was right up my alley artistically and as a scholar of Africana Studies. Songs of Black Folk is a journey following the music from the Middle Passage all the way up until contemporary times — a celebration of the Black musical tradition.
How did you uncover the personal story that was there — this narrative that you put together?
Trying to figure out the narrative was the core of our work. Haley had this really rich interview, and there were a lot of different ways she could have gone, so she wasn’t exactly sure. You have Reverend Dr. Leslie D. Braxton’s story (founder of Songs of Black Folk), Ramón Bryant Braxton’s story (conductor & artistic director of Songs of Black Folk), Seattle’s story, Tacoma’s story, Juneteenth, and then Black musical tradition. There’s just a lot there, you know? For me, it helped to identify the core of the story — which was Ramón’s relationship to his grandmother — and how that one level embodied all of those other stories.
The other films you’ve done were narrative short films. How was it working on a slightly longer documentary?
One of the strengths I brought to my and Haley’s collaboration was my ability to identify story through character. I never really thought about how important a narrative is in a documentary — we tend to think of them as information. Equally important is that we’re experiencing a person go through an emotional transformation as a result of that information that’s being discovered or revealed through the documentary. That’s what I leaned into.
In “Songs,” Ramón Braxton, one of your subjects, was talking about how there’s less of a subsect of African American culture that people associate with the Pacific Northwest as opposed to other parts of the country. What do you think about that?
Oftentimes people think of Blackness as a monolith — even Black people oftentimes struggle to fit themselves inside a very narrow idea of Blackness. I like to try and teach my students and inspire artists to realize that there are infinite possibilities within Blackness; it’s not about trying to conform yourself into one idea that is “hip-hop,” that is “jazz.” There’s infinite expression within Black culture.
I also watched BIOLOGICAL, and I thought it was interesting how, for both of these projects, you’re focusing on this importance of music in African American culture. What has this music meant to you?
Music is the artistic lifeblood of so much that I do on stage and on film. I’m deeply inspired by it and its ability to capture and record human experience; there are so many things that can’t be said, but they can be sung or they can be played. Music is a language in and of itself, one that has deeply inspired me. As a theater director, even, I’ll often start building the world of the play by understanding the music or the sounds of that time. I’m just kind of naturally drawn toward music as a form of storytelling.
“Songs” started out when Juneteenth was first considered a federal holiday. This year, however, the presidential administration has implicitly begun to push back against it. Do you think that being able to capture events like this will have an impact on that?
The conversation around Juneteenth epitomizes a lot of American culture and American history, yet we’re still kind of forming the language and vocabulary to even discuss it. When Joe Biden made it a national holiday, many people in the nation didn’t even know what Juneteenth was. America trying to figure out its relationship to Juneteenth is really revealing the character and the heart of American culture itself for me.
Sometimes you need to speak things to keep them in existence. Things disappear throughout history because people stop talking about them, and they become erased from our consciousness. This film attempts to keep the conversation of Juneteenth on the consciousness of the nation — to keep wrestling with these difficult questions about our relationship to the history of Juneteenth. At the heart, what does American liberation and freedom mean in 2025 and beyond?
