Join The Explorers Club on November 23rd for an interdisciplinary look into the evolving archetype of the 21st century explorer.
In a two-hour lecture, screening, and performance at the Explorers Club, filmmaker Justice Jamal Jones, author and professor El Glasberg, and artist and Founder of Brave Leap Kim Matcharia present new archetypes of the 21st-century explorer. Combining scholarship, film, photography, and performance, they share fieldwork spanning ice, sea, and space, redefining exploration through identity, embodiment, and boundary-breaking practice.
This in-person event at the Explorers Club Headquarters will include an audience Q&A.
RESERVATIONS
This will be an in-person lecture at Explorers Club Headquarters.
In-person tickets are $20 for Members, and $35 for the General Public.
Check-in will begin at 6:00 pm, with a beer and wine reception from 6:00 – 7:00 pm
Justice Jamal Jones
Justice Jamal Jones is a filmmaker, director, and artistic alchemist based in New York City whose practice sits at the intersection of cinema, ritual, and exploration. Working across narrative film, documentary, music video, and mixed media, Jones uses filmmaking as a form of inquiry—venturing into landscapes, histories, and cultural memory to uncover stories that connect the personal to the ancestral and the local to the global.
Their award-winning short film How To Raise A Black Boy screened at more than 30 international festivals, including Sundance. Jones has also directed work for Converse, Calvin Klein, MTV, and ARRI, bringing a cinematic and poetic sensibility to projects that move fluidly between art, culture, and commerce.
A member of The Explorers Club, 2026 Sundance Trans Possibilities Fellow, and 2021 Sundance Ignite Fellow, Jones is increasingly extending their filmmaking practice into field research and site-specific exploration. Their work often draws on ritual, choreography, ecology, and place to investigate themes of memory, transformation, ancestral connection, and the unseen histories embedded within landscapes.
This approach is exemplified by Notes on a Siren, a mixed-media film created in the Cayman Islands in collaboration with Palm Heights and featured by NOWNESS. Through movement, image, and environment, the film explores the relationship between body, landscape, and myth—reflecting Jones’s interest in using cinema not simply to document a place, but to listen to it.
Jones is currently developing their first feature film, centered on the Haitian revolutionary Romaine La Prophetess. The project brings together field research, archival excavation, historical inquiry, and speculative storytelling to reimagine a largely overlooked figure of Haitian history. Through this work, Jones explores how filmmaking can become a method of excavation—recovering buried histories while creating new ways of seeing the people, places, and ancestral forces that continue to shape our world.
Kim Macharia
Kim Macharia is an explorer, science communicator, artist, and community builder whose work empowers people to explore the world with curiosity and become better stewards of our planet. Her career has spanned space, sea, education, and the arts. From leading the Space Prize Foundation and expanding access to space exploration and STEM opportunities to managing maritime operations for Sail4th 250, the international gathering of tall ships and naval vessels that brought millions of people to the New York–New Jersey waterfront in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, Kim’s love of science and adventure has deeply informed her work.
A sailor in New York Harbor, Kim has seen firsthand how exploration can transform the way people connect with both place and planet. She is also the founder of Brave Leap, an exploration-focused initiative that has partnered with organizations including the Climate Imaginarium, South Street Seaport Museum, and NYC Resistor to produce creative, climate-focused programming. Brave Leap’s projects include the Explorer’s Mindset Workshop, which encourages people to use curiosity and courage to navigate the unknown, and “A Siren’s Prayer”, Kim’s original musical that interrogates humanity’s relationship with the ocean through music and storytelling. Across her work, Kim seeks to make exploration more accessible and transform the wonder of discovery into meaningful action.
El Glasberg
El Glasberg can still remember the look and feel of the big illustrated library copy of Jules Verne 1,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo lives on in Glasberg’s work on Nineteenth Century south polar fantasies in American literature. An NSF-funded stay in Antarctica shifted the focus to what Ursula LeGuin called “the living ice” and contemporary photographers including Eliot Porter, An-My Le, Connie Samaras, and Anne Noble. In addition to a book, Antarctica As Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change (Palgrave/Macmillan 2012), Glasberg has published on “Ideal and Idealized Explorer Typologies” in A Cultural History of Exploration in the Modern Age (Martin Thomas, ed. Bloomsbury 2024) and contributed chapters to Lisa Bloom’s Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics (Duke University Press 2023) among numerous other essays.
