Film Team

Dilsey Davis is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and writer whose life mission is to use the Arts, and particularly film, to advance society by building social bridges and fostering a greater understanding of the oneness of humanity. She has created documentaries, television series, and educational media that bring overlooked stories to the forefront and amplify voices often absent from the historical record. Most notably, she was the creator, producer, and director of Nuestro Barrio, the first Spanish-language series to air on English-language television in the United States.

Davis is the founder of Café con Leche Media and the co-founder of One Human Family Workshops, Inc., a non-profit organization that promotes racial and religious unity through music. One Human Family is featured in her documentary short, Now Let Us Sing which was produced as part of the Hindsight Project, a collaboration between ReelSouth, Firelight Media, and the Center for Asian American Media. The film was broadcast on PBS and shown at many film festivals including Cucalorus and Doc NYC. She produced and directed four documentary shorts for ITVS/Independent Lens's Stories for Social Justice on rural jails in North Carolina and Tennessee which included the films Zoo Crew and Sheriff Paula Dance: Bringing Change to Pittt County. The East Tennessee based short, Daughters of Addiction was broadcast on PBS. She also produced the short documentary HEART: Serving Our Neighbors in Crises in collaboration with RTI, the City of Durham and the Durham Police Department over a six-month period to capture the development of the Holistic Empathetic Alternative Response Team (HEART), a new public safety department in Durham.
More recently, she directed and produced the country music documentary, Rissi Palmer: Still Here which premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and subsequently aired on the PBS American Masters series special called “In the Making.” Whether exploring civil rights history, cultural identity, community resilience, or the arts, Davis's work is driven by a belief in the power of storytelling to deepen understanding, challenge assumptions, and inspire meaningful change.