Hello, I’m Jama.

I’m a Somali-American cinematographer and director from Seattle.

I got into filmmaking through journalism. I was reporting and filming, spending a lot of time with people before I always knew what the story was going to be. That was also how I found documentary and realized pretty quickly that it made sense to me. You had to listen. You had to pay attention to what was actually happening instead of showing up with everything already decided. I still work that way now, even when the production itself is much more structured.

Most of my work moves between documentary and narrative, from independent films to commissioned projects. I work closely with directors, and a lot of what I shoot is character-driven, often in people’s homes, community spaces, and places that already have their own rhythm.

A lot of the stories I’ve been part of are centered on underrepresented communities. That matters to me personally. I grew up rarely seeing people who looked like me on screen, and I think that absence is part of what pulled me toward this work in the first place. It’s also made me pretty conscious of the responsibility that comes with filming people, especially when you’re being trusted with something personal.

Over the past few years, I’ve also spent a lot of time living and working outside the U.S., including in Mogadishu, Jeddah, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo. It’s meant getting used to working in different places, sometimes with a lot of time to settle in and sometimes pretty quickly. That’s become a normal part of how I work now.

I also co-run Humxn Media, a documentary-driven studio I co-founded. We work with organizations and communities on stories that need a larger production around them, while also slowly building toward more original documentary work of our own.

Right now I’m developing long form documentary and narrative projects while continuing to work as a cinematographer.