Jeffrey Palmer

Overview

Jeffrey Palmer is an Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University and a member of the Kiowa Tribe. He is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist. He describes his work as a multimedia exploration of Indigenous people's lives in twenty-first century America. In the Spring of 2026, he completed work on two short documentary installations for the Barack Obama Foundation, as part of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois a project that took three years in the making. His first feature narrative script entitled Ghosts, based on his award-winning short film, was awarded runner-up for the Writers Guild of America East Fellowship at the 2025 Stowe Story Labs. In 2022, his short film Ghosts premiered in two hemispheres, the Skábmagovat Film Festival in Inari, Finland and the Maoriland Film Festival in Otaki, New Zealand, and premiered in the United States on PBS. In 2019 he completed his first feature film, N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear, examining the life and mind of the first and only Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on the PBS series, American Masters. In 2020, the film was nominated for an Emmy in support of American Masters' 33rd season, for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series. The film also won the 2019 Ted Turner Award for the film that most encourages environmental stewardship. Of Palmer's numerous short films, Isabelle's Garden, was a winner of the Bill and Melinda Gates Short Film Challenge at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. 

His films screened at venues such as Hot Docs, The Seattle International Film Festival, The Berlinale European Market, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and many others around the world. He received numerous awards, grants, and recognition from the Sundance Institute, ITVS, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Wyncote Filmmaker Fellowship, Stowe Story Labs, and the Firelight Media Documentary Lab. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America, International Documentary Association, Television Academy. 

He is currently working on his second feature documentary entitled Kiowa Voices: The Preservation of Story, Landscape, and Language.

Research Focus

As an Indigenous filmmaker, I am most interested in revealing untold stories of Native America. There are so many missed opportunities to describe the richness of Native peoples' lives. I try to provide the most accurate and compelling stories from Indian Country, through my filmmaking. I challenge misrepresentations of stories created by the effects of settler colonialism and racist stereotypes, dominate in the mainstream. Indeed, many films failed to present the diversity and vitality of Native peoples but instead shackled them to the past. We continue to be shown as victims, voiceless, hopeless and without agency. I must show Native cultures as vibrant and thriving, influential and deeply rooted in American life. 

As an artist I try to concentrate on the positive attributes within my stories and how Indigenous art, dance, food, music, and literature restore our society. My work examines the socio-political issues surrounding the protection of the environment and the implementation of Indigenous Futurism as a tool for creating safer spaces for our children and fighting generational trauma. My vision as an artist is to create screen sovereignty and create impact through community building and curation. I describe my art as a personal exploration of Native American "life" in the past, present, and future. It is exploratory because of the multitude of diversity in our cultures. Paired with my own experience, I infuse this multimedia work with stories that focus on the land, the creation of place, diversity of traditions, diversity of language, and a window into the spiritual world. I thrive on community involvement and try to have substantive collaboration with the people I represent, a shared ethnography in the construction of new epistemologies, that create thick meaning within fiction and non-fiction. My practice is based on a deep connection to the land. This symbiosis is of utmost importance. The land is a conduit of tribal memory, origin, and creation. Thus, I film my collaborators in the environments they recognize most, their ancestral homelands.

Courses 
PMA 3570 Film and Video Production 1 
PMA 3571 Documentary Filmmaking  
PMA 4585 Film and Video Production 2 
PMA 1611 PMA Studios