Curtis Taylor, Jr. is a writer/director from St. Louis, MO whose work centers world-building with blackness at the intersection of fiction. After completing his M.Ed with an emphasis on black masculinity at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Taylor moved to Los Angeles to further expand the visual language around his work. Always having had a fascination with the fantastical, filmmaking gave Curtis a medium to turn intrigue into his practice. As a writer/director with a reverence for language, Taylor strives to use his gaze to move the needle while simultaneously offering an etherealness to Black life on screen. However, even while toeing the line between reality and fiction, it’s paramount that his work still has bones of the familial. His ongoing commitment to equitably making space for future Black and brown minds led him to found Residue Pictures, his film/production studio. Residue Pictures is one of Taylor’s long-term solutions to leverage access for underrepresented voices and give resources to next-gen talent who seek to add nuanced narratives to the canon. What keeps him going, is the possibility to imagineer a world tomorrow that yesterday never knew.