Zaire Love is a filmmaker, music maker and writer in Mississippi.
In her short documentary film "Trees," her grandmother Dorothy is the star - and storyteller.
Dorothy grew up in Sledge, Mississippi - in the Delta. Both of her parents were sharecroppers, paid cents for picking hundreds of pounds of cotton a day in the 1950’s. They raised Dorothy and her ten siblings in a one-bedroom home.
![Zaire Love](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/fe3dc3a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1703x1779+0+0/resize/880x919!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fsites%2Fwutc%2Ffiles%2F202105%2FZaire_0.jpg)
Throughout the film, we hear Dorothy’s stories and memories - and we learn how they have shaped her granddaughter Zaire’s work, as a documentarian who highlights and explores the stories of Southern Black women.
Zaire recently graduated from the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
She is now the Southern Foodways filmmaker there - and she’ll be teaching at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.