Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His debut documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won 9 awards on the international festival circuit, including being named to TIFF Canada’s Top Ten. Joynt is the author of two books: the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. Most recently, he directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories for the CW, which are now streaming on Netflix. His episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing in 2022. With Samantha Curley, Chase runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles.

After seeing my work in public, people often ask: "Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?" The boundaries, investments and tensions revealed by these questions are emblematic of my interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly pursuits. My research sits at the intersection of cinema and media studies, gender and feminist studies, documentary film production, trans studies, and queer theory. My current film, Framing Agnes, is complementary to a book, Conceptualizing Agnes: Exemplary Cases and the Disciplines of Gender, co-authored with University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt and under contract with Duke University Press. Working with newly discovered archival materials, the multi-format project urgently engages historical and contemporary debates about the production of expert knowledge, by implicating both social scientists and non-fiction media makers in the construction of exemplary cases and related legacies of research about gender non-conforming people. Framing Agnes premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently being developed into a feature film with support from Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program. With Aisling Chin-Yee, I co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about transmasculine jazz musician Billy Tipton. No Ordinary Man was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress and world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020.

Chase Joynt is a transgender moving-image artist and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His latest short film, Framing Agnes, premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, won the Audience Award at Outfest in Los Angeles, and is being developed into a feature film with support from Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program. Awarded the EP Canada/Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist, Joynt’s first bookYou Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was a 2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist and named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and CBC.