Sharee Silerio asked God to make her melanin-rich skin lighter after moving into a predominantly white neighborhood in Florissant. As a young Black girl, the event triggered some of the earliest forms of racism she’d come across.
“Crispy.”
“Burnt.”
“Raccoon.”
“You’re ugly because you’re Black,” her white classmates told her.
Silerio found her voice by turning to film and television to escape.
Now, the Webster graduate uses film to champion other Black women’s and girl’s voices and stories.
Silerio went from making home movies with her parents’ camcorder to winning an Oscar and owning her own film production company in two decades.
Her journey with film and television started with the constant feeling that she did not have a place she belonged. Using the camcorder her parents bought to record her brother’s football games, she began to make her own media.
“Watching movies, music videos and sitcoms became my refuge,” Silerio writes on her website. “Expressing myself through poetry; videotaping myself lip-syncing and dancing to my favorite music; reciting monologues on the family camcorder; and recording my sister act out scenes of a horror film I wrote allowed me to be and see myself.”
The Webster alum won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film for her work as production coordinator on “The Last Repair Shop.” The film tells the tale of the shop that repairs 80,000 musical instruments given to Los Angeles public school children at no cost.
“For a story like that to be recognized with an Oscar that I helped make was literally a dream come true,” Silerio said.
The filmmaker strives to tell real, meaningful stories of Black women. As she writes on her website, she wants Black women and girls to feel they “exist as full human beings on screen and feel seen, heard, loved and affirmed beyond the screen.”
Her Webster graduate thesis broke down the historical nature, depictions and stereotypes of Black women in the media.
Studying media communications at Webster showed her that once she engaged with the world from other perspectives, she was able to open her imagination to more than she initially thought was possible. She learned how media can influence the real world.
“Webster greatly impacted what I do as a filmmaker,” she said. “It got me excited about creating content that challenges those stereotypes and historical narratives about Black women and Black people that don’t pay a complex, mostly accurate, fair or human-centered depiction of who we are as a community.”
Silerio met one of her mentors, Joyce Fitzpatrick, while interning in St. Louis as a production assistant for Fitzpatrick’s documentary, “The Color of Medicine,” in 2018. The film recounts the history of medical training of Black nurses and doctors at Homer G. Phillips Hospital.
Fitzpatrick recalls Silerio remaining true to herself during the project, saying she is “her own individual person” and doesn’t need to be loud or overly comedic to stand out. She also knows that Silerio sincerely cares about more than just the people on set – she cares about those whose stories she’s telling, too.
Silerio naturally gravitates toward stories that focus on people who experience “the most horrendous things, but something helps them get to the other side and they also, in the process, impact other people’s lives.” She wants to center her own stories and projects around these types of stories.
She seeks to challenge stereotypes and historical narratives about Black women through her own work.
Two producers, Beatriz Browne and Rachel Greenwald, reached out to Silerio on Brown Girls Doc Mafia, a site for women of color in documentary filmmaking that tries to disrupt inequity in the film industry. When she arrived on set, Browne and Greenwald asked her when she would be moving to Los Angeles. She moved to Southern California in August 2022.
She said that had it not been for those producers reaching out to her, she would not be where she is today.
In 2022 and within two months of moving to Los Angeles, she landed a production coordinator role with Breakwater Studios, an award-winning film studio that focuses on documentary shorts. Less than two years later, Silerio became part of an Oscar-winning team.
At Breakwater, Silerio has learned what it takes to create impactful and powerful award-winning work. She has also learned more about herself as a filmmaker.
“I’m all heart,” she said. “I care just just as much about the work and how it impacts the people who bring it to life…We [the crew] all have something valuable and beautiful to bring to the table.”
Fitzpatrick recognized that Silerio puts people first when working on a project.
“In some cases, the family ends at the end of the movie. In other cases, you will continue those relationships. I do have a lot of people that are still in my life from previous projects that I’ve worked on because some people you just click with,” Fitzpatrick said. “Sharee is one of those people.”
Silerio’s done more than just work for film production companies. She’s started her own one, too.
She launched Starlight Pictures, a film, television, digital and streaming production company, in 2023. She creates projects that focus on her goal as a filmmaker – telling stories where Black girls and women “exist as full human beings on screen and feel seen, heard, loved and affirmed beyond the screen.”
Silerio’s ultimate dream is to operate Starlight Pictures full-time as a full media production company and be able to create an environment that is affirmative, flexible and safe. She hopes the production company has all of the things she felt like she’s needed throughout her life, but didn’t necessarily have.
Silerio emphasizes the importance of shining light in darkness and adding love to people’s lives through her work. Starlight Pictures heals her inner child, the filmmaker said.
The production company’s name describes exactly what she wants to do in her film career.
“Starlight means stars can only shine in darkness,” she said. “Since darkness and the color black is typically considered negative in our society, and Black people are also seen in a negative light, I want to create films that make room for the light within Black people, particularly Black women, to shine, as they are depicted at their most authentic, true, transparent selves.”
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