meet jamila
Jamila Glass is a creative working in Los Angeles in dance, television, and film and is the new Artistic Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company (LACDC), one of LA’s leading contemporary dance companies. As a filmmaker and choreographer, she is known for creating cinematic journeys of movement, shaping characters, and building worlds that reflect what make us human. Her work has garnered mentions in NY Times, L.A. Times, Essence Magazine, Ebony Magazine, and Mashable.
Raised in Houston, Texas, Glass attended the multi-Grammy award-winning High School for the Performing and Visual Arts as a vocal music major. She went on to acquire her BA in Film and Video Production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television with a minor in Advertising.
Post graduation, she was the 1st assistant director of the short film “Chixculub” produced by Wolfgang Peterson, which was a grand jury prize winner of the USA Film Festival and an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival. She also worked at Mark Woollen & Associates, a premiere motion picture advertising agency. While there, she was a post-production assistant and assistant editor for such films as Crash, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Good Night and Good Luck, Hard Candy, The Last King of Scotland, The Science of Sleep, and Syriana.
Jamila, a director/screenwriter, is currently producing films through her production company The Cutting Room where she has directed 20 critically-acclaimed short dance films, a television pilot, and 2 music videos that have garnered international praise, including film screenings in London, Paris and Lebanon. Her previous work as a freelance editor includes documentary shorts, national radio commercials, and an award-winning independent television network.
To further her knowledge of the craft, Jamila shadowed award-winning filmmaker Justin Simien on his feature film Bad Hair as well as Simien and director Tiffany Johnson on two episodes of the Netflix series Dear White People (Season 3).
In addition to being the Artistic Director, she is also a founding member of LACDC. Over the last 18 years, she has toured with them across the country and abroad to Argentina and New Zealand. She previously served as LACDC’s Media Director and Summer/Winter Intensives Director where combining her passions for film and marketing elevated the company's visibility across continents.
As a performer, she has worked with Ryan Heffington, Galen Hooks, Nina McNeely, Kathryn Burns, David Dorfman, Adam Parson, and Mecca Vazie Andrews. Other credits include Paul McCartney, Colbie Caillat, Foster the People Tour, Vitamin String Quartet, Terrace Martin, Comedy Central's This Is Not Happening, the Netflix film Mascots (Christopher Guest), American Horror Story, Mastercard, Samsung, & NY Times Best Selling photography book Dancers Among Us.
Her choreography work includes Netflix's Dear White People (Justin Simien) as series choreographer for their final musical season, PRADA’s Galleria campaign (Xavier Dolan/Vogue Italia’s Ferdinando Verderi), Hulu's feature film Bad Hair (Justin Simien), BET's TV Series Twenties (Lena Waithe), and HBO’s The Beauty of Blackness (Tiffany Johnson). She recently choreographed and co-directed two commercials for Splice, the music industry's highest quality, royalty-free sample library.
Glass directed 5 dance films in 2021, including INSECTOS: arte y vida, a commission by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain, featuring Spanish Choreographer Elías Aguirre. Other directorial work includes SUMMON, featuring the music of Emmy award-winning and Grammy and Oscar-nominated composer Kris Bowers.
You can learn more about her choreography work in the L.A. Times, Essence Magazine, Words That Move Me podcast, and a podcast with Tanya Acker.
She is represented by The Movement Talent Agency and is a member of the Television Academy, the CHOREOGRAPHERS GUILD and SAG-AFTRA.
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View her current class schedule.