Joanelle Romero

Joanelle Romero, an American actress and filmmaker, started and heads the Red Nation Television Network and the Red Nation International Film Festival. In 1991 she founded Spirit World Productions, moved by the shortage of Native representation in entertainment. The company released her documentary short American Holocaust: When It's All Over I'll Still Be Indian, which Ed Asner narrated. Romero directed, produced, wrote and scored music for the film, and it earned a place on the Academy Award shortlist in the Documentary Short Branch. Her screen acting includes The Girl Called Hatter Fox (1977), a television movie drawn from a Marilyn Harris novel, plus Barbarosa (1982), Parasite (1982) and Powwow Highway (1989). She established the nonprofit Red Nation Celebration Institute in 1995. In 2005 she received the Armin T. Wegner Humanitarian Award. The National Women's History Project named her a Women's History Month honoree in 2007. Her membership in the American Film Academy dates to 2016.