Zoë Colfax has enjoyed telling stories for as long as she can remember — whether performing on stage or sharing a silly story with her family.

And as far back as third grade, when she made her theater debut as Caliban in a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in her hometown of Santa Fe, Colfax was acutely aware of how people responded to her language choices. And she’d tinker with different approaches that might strengthen the connection with her audience. 

“I started to realize, ‘Well, if I say a line this way I get a laugh, but if I try it another way I might not,’” she remembered. “So I would experiment. I’d even do it around the family dinner table. If I had a story to tell, I would play around with different ways of telling it and see how it landed.”

Colfax has continued to explore different modes of storytelling in the years since, including as a student at Yale College, where she arrived as a first-year student in the fall of 2021. She’d decided to attend Yale because she knew she’d have a chance to continue developing her storytelling skills while also pursuing her interest in African American studies.

Combining those interests, she found that she was increasingly drawn to stories about social issues — and those with the potential to change the world. It was her own family influences — particularly her father’s work as a civil rights attorney — that inspired her passion for social justice.

And she decided to focus on an entirely new medium: documentary filmmaking.