Name: Jéssica Queiroz
Area of work: Directing, Screenwriting, Editing
Program: Bolsa
Edition: 2025
City: São Paulo
State: SP
E-mail: [email protected]
Jessica Queiroz is 32, a Black woman from the outskirts of São Paulo, and she found in cinema a way of looking at the world and giving back images that rarely make it to the screen. Trained in Film Directing at the Academia Internacional de Cinema and in Editing at Instituto Criar, she has spent the past decade moving between editing, screenwriting, and directing. The result is a career that doesn’t fit neatly on a single shelf: it runs across advertising, music videos, award-winning short films, streaming series, and original projects in development. Her name began circulating strongly in 2017, when she released Peripatético. Shot in São Paulo’s periphery with a cast of non-professional and first-time actors, the short revisits the memory of the police attacks of May 2006 to tell a story about youth, waiting, and a suspended future. Premiering at the Brasília Film Festival, it won two prizes — Best Screenplay and the Special Jury Prize — and went on to international festivals such as Rotterdam and BlackStar in Philadelphia. Critics took notice. For Ela Bittencourt, writing for Mubi, the film balanced political gravity with an “artistic and playful” construction, oscillating between naturalism and dream. Luiz Zanin, of Estadão, called it “a discovery,” noting how Jessica combined “pop formulas” with a depiction of the periphery as a place of vitality and invention. Even before Peripatético, Jessica had experimented with this blend of rigor and improvisation. Vidas de Carolina (2014), a documentary about writer Carolina Maria de Jesus, won a Criando Asas grant. In 2015 she directed Número e Série. She also helmed music videos such as Lesbigay, by Aíla, and Dona de Mim, by pop star Iza, as part of a TikTok special. Advertising, meanwhile, gave her discipline and command of form. She worked at major agencies like Africa and Talent Marcel, then as a director at Paranoid BR. That experience allowed her to lead campaigns for Avon, Nivea, Volkswagen, Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp, all while preserving the aesthetic sharpness that became her signature. Her versatility extends to long-form storytelling. After shadowing the production of 3%, Netflix’s first Brazilian series, Jessica was invited to direct Mila in the Multiverse, for Disney+, a sci-fi aimed at young audiences. On the same platform, she led Passinho: No Ritmo dos Sonhos, a documentary-musical series about funk dance culture, while on Amazon Prime she directed Sutura, a medical thriller. Each project underscored her ability to handle scale without losing the energy rooted in her background and formation. Between shoots, she ventured into formats designed for social media. She directed Terra das Crianças, hosted by Gisele Bündchen, and Tapa na Cara, an interview program with writer Tati Bernardi — both conceived for Instagram. These projects revealed her willingness to experiment with language and format, erasing boundaries between advertising, series, and authorial work: everything became ground for invention. Now Jessica is developing Melanina, a drama series selected by Spcine’s development fund. The project is set in a beauty salon in the outskirts and follows the lives of Black women in their routines, conversations, disputes, and affections. The premise is simple, but the ambition is not: to portray life in these spaces without reducing the peripheral experience to suffering, but instead showing humor, solidarity, and social critique. From a short film awarded in Brasília to campaigns for global brands, from streaming series to Instagram projects, Jessica Queiroz has built a trajectory that never stands still. Her cinema emerges at the intersection of technical rigor and political urgency, advertising repertoire and peripheral experience. In every work, her signature is evident: looking at places and people rarely at the center and, by doing so, revealing not only what is missing from the screens but also the abundance of vitality outside them.
In 2025, Jéssica was selected for TFL Next Series and became part of the Talent Network.
