Yolonda Johnson-Young

Yolonda Johnson-Young is a Philadelphia, PA native director and filmmaker. She began learning documentary filmmaking in 2017 after receiving a full scholarship to attend Scribe Video Center's inaugural Film Scholar program, supported by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

In 2013, she earned a degree at Pierce College in entrepreneurship, and through her hard work and dedication; she merited induction into Delta Mu Delta, the National Honor Society for business degrees holders. Yolonda also received both the ’18 Leeway Art and Change Grant and a ’19 Window of Opportunity grant to further her filmmaking efforts.

In 2018, Good Pitch Local Philadelphia, a Doc Society event, invited Yolonda to pitch her film project, Finding Elijah. She returned to GPL Philadelphia in 2020 to pitch her latest project, Another Life - A Black Family in WITSEC (aka the federal witness protection program). Yolonda also received a 2019 Philadelphia Independent Media Finishing Fund grants to complete post-production work on Finding Elijah.

Her first short documentary, Finding Elijah (2019, 25 mins); is a multiple award winning short documentary that has screened in over 20 festivals since August 2019 and in 2020 made its regional broadcast premiere on WHYY TV, Philadelphia's public broadcast station. In 2019, Yolonda became a founding member of a WOC film collective. SIFTMedia215 is a support system of several independent media artists who work in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and provide a community of support for socially conscious women identified filmmakers. The goal at S.I.F.T. Media is to amplify the work of and create opportunities for Black and Latinx Women content creators.