Gary pursued a professional career in acting but she soon became disheartened by the reductive roles and characters that she was offered.[3] She then enrolled at Brooklyn College and completed a dual bachelor of art degree in Documentary Film Production and Africana Studies.[2]
She later received her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. She also holds a Documentary Filmmaking Certificate from the LV Prasad Academy in Chennai, India.[4]
Career
Filmmaking
Gary's work has focused on themes such as black feminist subjectivity and has confronted the history of these subjects by featuring archival footage in her work. Her 2015 short film An Ecstatic Experience combined clips of actress Ruby Dee with an interview of Assata Shakur, using a technique she called "direct animation."[2]
In 2016, Gary participated in the Terra Summer Residency program, in Giverny, France.[5] During that time, she produced her short film Giverny I (Négresse Impériale), which combined video clips of herself with the footage filmed by Philando Castile's girlfriend shortly after he was shot by a police officer. The film is also included in her 2019 documentary The Giverny Document that explores what it means to live life as a Black woman. The film received critical acclaim and garnered awards from festivals including the Blackstar Film Festival and Locarno International Film Festival.[2]
In conversation with Michael B. Gillespie, a film theorist and historian at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Gary described her process: "I am simultaneously creating and destroying, remaking and unmaking. My intimate interaction with the archive... expresses my desire to be a part of it, to make my presence felt in and on that history while also interrogating it."[6] Gillespie noted that "Gary renders film blackness as cinema in the wake, an assemblage of work that poses new circuits and aesthetic accountings of blackness, sociality, and obliteration."[6]
Gary worked as a post-production and archival assistant for Spike Lee's Bad 25 and Shola Lynch's Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,[7] as well as assistant editor on Jackie Robinson, a two-part biographical documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, which premiered April 2016 on PBS.[8]
In June 2013, Gary was among the founding members of the New Negress Film Society, a collective of black women filmmakers that seeks to create a community and raise awareness of black female voices and stories in the film industry.[13]
Gary was a 2018–2019 Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center fellow at Harvard University.[5] She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and by Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris.[15]