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Kiersten Dunbar Chace is an award-winning independent film producer and director with Mondé World Films, as well as an author and human rights advocate. For more than 27 years, she has focused her camera lens on South Africa, documenting stories of identity, resilience, and human rights.

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In 2009, she produced her first feature-length documentary, I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured – Identity at the Cape of Good Hope, which explored the legacy of apartheid through the perspective of the mixed-race/Cape Coloured/Khoe community. The film won the Audience Choice Award at the Africa World Documentary Film Festival in Bermuda, screened at numerous international festivals, and has been shown at more than 70 universities worldwide. In 2014, it was one of only two films selected to present at the academic conference Migrating the Black Body: Visual Arts and the African Diaspora in Hanover, Germany.

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Her second feature documentary, Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise, examines South Africa’s young democracy and the challenges facing its Coloured communities. It has been screened internationally at the United Nations in Geneva, the Human Rights Film Festival in Barcelona, New York, and Paris, the Twin Cities Film Festival, the Vancouver South Africa Film Festival, and the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at USC.

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Other projects include Solveig – The Life and Artwork of Solveig Arneng Johnson (2011), the first documentary about a Saami American immigrant from Norway; Munguía (2022), produced for the Arizona Archaeology Site Steward Conference; and collaborations such as Conspiracy to Be Free: The Russell Means Story (2013). Her short Tami Tushie’s Toys (2013), co-produced with Melody Gilbert, won the Audience Choice Award at the International Documentary Challenge (Hot Docs Toronto) and aired on the Documentary Channel.

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Chace is also an author. In 2024, she published At the Table When – South Africa, a unique introspection of the Coloured/mixed-race communities in South Africa, presenting a curated collection of quotes gathered from interview conversations from her two documentary films. In 2025, she will release her latest book, She Who Holds the Wind, a richly textured novel of feminine reckoning and spiritual inheritance, drawn from true events and lived experience, where silence carries meaning, presence becomes prayer, and the most profound transformations begin not with answers, but with the courage to stay.

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Advocacy & Human Rights Work

Beyond filmmaking, Chace is deeply engaged in international advocacy. She served as a human rights advocate and stakeholder at the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (2017) in Geneva, Switzerland, where she joined a small team of South Africans in presenting human rights concerns. In 2015, she also served as an observer during the submission of a Shadow Report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), citing South Africa’s violations of the CERD Treaty.
 

Her films have been used as supplemental resources at the UN to educate members on the struggles and history of the Khoe/Coloured community.

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Most recently, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the Arizona Site Steward Program Foundation, where she advocates for the protection and stewardship of Arizona’s cultural heritage sites.

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Ethos

Chace’s work is rooted in creating safe spaces for marginalized communities to share their stories without outside imposition, judgment, or distortion. Her guiding commitments are:

• To allow people to tell their own stories without an American narrative or comparison.

• To emphasize that freedom must be defined by those who have been historically or currently marginalized.

• To highlight both the suffering and the transcendent humanity that connect us across cultures.
   

Associations

• Board of Directors – Arizona Site Steward Program Foundation

• Member – Critical Mixed Race Studies Global Caucus

• Inaugural Member – Hanson Film Institute Producer’s Club, University of Arizona

• Former Member – FilmNorth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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