Zoë Colfax has enjoyed telling stories for as long as she can remember — whether performing on stage or sharing a silly story with her family.
And as far back as third grade, when she made her theater debut as Caliban in a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in her hometown of Santa Fe, Colfax was acutely aware of how people responded to her language choices. And she’d tinker with different approaches that might strengthen the connection with her audience.
“I started to realize, ‘Well, if I say a line this way I get a laugh, but if I try it another way I might not,’” she remembered. “So I would experiment. I’d even do it around the family dinner table. If I had a story to tell, I would play around with different ways of telling it and see how it landed.”
Colfax has continued to explore different modes of storytelling in the years since, including as a student at Yale College, where she arrived as a first-year student in the fall of 2021. She’d decided to attend Yale because she knew she’d have a chance to continue developing her storytelling skills while also pursuing her interest in African American studies.
Combining those interests, she found that she was increasingly drawn to stories about social issues — and those with the potential to change the world. It was her own family influences — particularly her father’s work as a civil rights attorney — that inspired her passion for social justice.
And she decided to focus on an entirely new medium: documentary filmmaking.
Zoë Colfax films a professional soccer game between New Mexico United and Los Angeles Football Club as a videographer for the United during the 2024 season.
She had first become fascinated with filmmaking just before she arrived at Yale — in part because of pandemic-related restrictions that kept her away from the stage. During the final months of high school she was forced to learn new skills, such as videography and digital production, as more and more of her life moved online. While this shift brought some frustrations, she also enjoyed the new opportunities that filmmaking offered — not to mention its potential to reach wider audiences.
“Film is unique in that you can share your stories so much farther,” she said. “So I started to make documentaries, and the stories that stood out to me were stories about race and what it means to be Black in America. And I started to learn how your voice can really affect change.”
For her first documentary, “Mixed,” she drew on her and her sisters’ experiences growing up in a family with a mixed-race background, exploring how they’ve learned to navigate questions of race in their own lives. In another project, she told the story of her father and his unconventional upbringing in a family that lived off the land in northern California.
At Yale, where she is a part of Pierson College, she has continued to hone her media-related skills (including as a videographer with the Athletics department and the Office of Public Affairs & Communications). She joined an improv group (which, she says, fulfilled the needs of “Theater Zoë”). And she tackled justice-related projects on campus and in New Haven. She ran the pardon program for the Undergraduate Prison Project, a student-led organization that challenges inequities in the criminal justice system.
For a history course during her first year at Yale, she studied the history of a community known as Blackdom, a former Black homesteader community in New Mexico, which she’d first learned about from a short blurb in a high school textbook. The project eventually grew into her senior thesis, a documentary that also explores the story of descendants from Blackdom who hope to regain access to land that has become shut off by private property owners. (The documentary was recently awarded the William Pickens Prize from the Department of African American Studies and the Howard R. Lamar Prize in Film and Media Studies.)
She’s returning to New Mexico after graduation to expand on her story about Blackdom with the support of Firelight Media, a nonprofit that supports documentary filmmaking. Having the chance to tell an important but mostly forgotten story about the contributions of Black Americans in her home state, she said, speaks to something that she learned from her father.
“His message to me and my siblings was, ‘Try to do something that’s meaningful and that uplifts others. You don’t live in this world just for yourself — you’re part of a community.’
“For me, continuing to tell stories that do good, and that create change, that’s the seed of it all.”
