Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons of Jamaica

The Reimagining Queen Nanny Documentary

Official Logline: Reimagining Queen Nanny – Chieftess of Blue Mountain’s biodiversity, forests and waters.

Director: Udemba McLean
Co-Writer/Narrator: Marcia B. Douglas (Ph.D.)

This documentary, written and produced by Jamaican Professor at NYU Leo Douglas, seeks to retell the story of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, national heroine of Jamaica. Traditionally Nanny has been portrayed through a lens of mountain guerrilla warfare, but here she is represented in what some scholars of the Black Atlantic and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade believe to be a more accurate and broader reality – an early Afro-Caribbean ecologist, a protector of the forests and watersheds, as the quintessential Black conservationist and environmental justice leader, and scholar of the sacred things and places of the mountains of eastern Jamaica.

According to Professor Douglas, “the documentary highlights the untold herstories of Queen Nanny as a fundamental means of deepening our understanding of the leadership of Afro-descendant women on whose shoulders we stand as natural history scholars and as members of the environmental movement.” The documentary is positioned as a fresh and informative retelling of community and ancestral cultural preservation on Jamaica, including a description of a rich pantheon of West African knowledge and traditional practices about wild birds, plants, herbal healing and the conservation of the natural world.

The documentary focuses on Akan/Ashanti continuations, gendered-roles, sacred plants, and Twi names that Jamaicans still use to describe things in the natural world today. Knowledge and experiences that are largely unrecognized or undiscussed in Jamaican culture as being of West African origin. By positioning Nanny as one of the island’s first naturalists, and as a central and early Afro-Caribbean eco-spiritual leader of renown, the documentary also explores questions about the intersection of racial identity, gender, sexuality, and religious racism in relation to womanhood and how Afro-Caribbean women are (and have been) perceived - if and when they choose to work on the land, be it as farmers, herbalists, eco-spiritual leaders or as environmental protectors.

Award-winning Jamaican Professor Marcia Douglas of the University of Colorado - Boulder, who portrays Queen Nanny in the documentary feature, said she felt that “Queen Nanny would have believed that nature was life, that it was spirit, and that the essence of our being remained around us, in the things that grew in the Mountains of Jamaica, even after death. That the natural world was also a spiritual world, a world of unseen and immeasurable powers, saturated with the energy and wisdom of our Afro-indigenous fore-parents, that all life was sacred, spiritual and full of teachable wisdom.”

The “Reimagining Nanny: Her Sword – A Seed Documentary” is part of a larger project which includes an original vocal composition about Nanny of the Maroons and five (5) large-scale winning visual arts representations of Queen Nanny which were exhibited at the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) between 2022 and 2024 – commissioned for Jamaica’s 60th year of independence from Great Britain.

Core partners are the Natural History Museum of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), BirdLife Jamaica, and the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust (JCDT). The Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust (JCDT) is a non-governmental organization and charity with a mandate to advance environmental conservation and sustainable development with a focus on the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Overwhelming funding for this project was from private Jamaican citizens. The artwork created as part of this documentary project - “Moonlight Meditations of Mama Nanny” by Jamaican artist, Richard Nattoo - was donated to the Institute of Jamaica (in public trust). Additional support was provided by New York University (NYU) through its College of Arts and Sciences, Liberal Studies, and the NYU Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).

The documentary, completed in October 2023, was released publicly on December 1, 2025.

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For further information or to schedule an interview contact:
Film Maker - Leo R Douglas
Email: [email protected]
  / reimagining_nanny  

OR

Documentary Director - Udemba McLean
Email: [email protected]
  / fulltimejamaican