Kenya-Jade Pinto, JD ’17, is a documentary photographer, filmmaker and lawyer. Her work intersects art and human rights as she navigates “displacement, belonging, and access to justice”, as described on her website. She’s currently the filmmaker-in-residence at York University’s Refugee Law Lab, working as part of a dynamic and cutting-edge interdisciplinary team.
Her roles as photographer and documentarian have brought her to the set of the feature film Scarborough, home to Nairobi, and most recently to migrant encampments in Greece.
Throughout 2021, Pinto’s work received national and international recognition. In September, Scarborough, a film she was the associate producer on, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where it was awarded the Shawn Mendez Foundation Changemaker Award and was the first runner up for the People’s Choice Award.
Pinto was also named a 2021 National Geographic Explorer, a title which includes a $30,000 research and exploration grant. The grant will help defray her expenses, allowing Pinto to continue The Sandbox, a long-term photo-documentary project. Some of the funds will also support local grassroots organizations she is partnering with.
In a recent chat with Pinto, she shared with us that the “University of Ottawa was actually my first choice when I applied to Common Law… Like many, a migration story is the cornerstone of my personal narrative, and it’s what brought me here wanting to focus on refugee and immigration law. I knew this school focused on social justice and had some of the best refugee and immigration law courses, clinics, and clubs in the country. […] Ironically, I also knew early that I was not going to practice in a traditional way”.
“Law school helped me understand what tangled policies and laws looked like, and began to equip me with the tools I needed to start pulling at those threads.
“And, of course, being on a Moot team, trained by Professor Daimsis, gave me the skills and the confidence to articulate my ideas clearly and pitch my stories to producers, editors, funders, and broadcasters.”
Professor Jamie Liew, who is the newly appointed Director of the Institute of Feminist & Gender Studies in the Faculty of Social Science, recently hired Pinto to photograph her for her soon-to-be published novel, Dandelion, and had these heartfelt words to share about Pinto:
“She is a talented photographer who has a unique ability to inform her work with her legal and critical race analysis. Her calming demeanour has a beautiful way of pulling information out of her subjects.”
Liew and Pinto are currently hoping to work on an immigration-related project in 2022.
When asked on how she decides which topic to bring to the big screen, Pinto humbly answered: “Not every story is mine to tell”.