Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, producer, and professor. He attracted acclaim as co-director with Aisling Chin-Yee of the documentary film No Ordinary Man, and as director of the film Framing Agnes (2022).

In 2020 he received a grant from Inside Out's Re:Focus Emergency Relief Fund for the completion of a feature film edition of Framing Agnes, which later premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where Joynt won both the Audience Award and the Innovator Prize in the NEXT program. In 2023, the film was part of the keynote event for the Moving Trans History Forward conference at the University of Victoria, which included a public screening of Framing Agnes and a panel discussion with Jen Richards, Jules Gill-Peterson, Morgan M Page, and Joynt himself.

No Ordinary Man Co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee, No Ordinary Man was Joynt's first feature film.

No Ordinary Man was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020. IndieWire called the film "an elegant riff on a classic progression that arrives at something transcendent."

Framing Agnes Expanding on his 2019 short film of the same name, Framing Agnes was Joynt's second feature film. After discovering case files from a 1950s gender clinic, a cast of trans actors turn a talk show inside out to confront the legacy of a young trans woman forced to choose between honesty and access. Agnes, the pseudonymized transgender woman who participated in Harold Garfinkel's gender health research at UCLA in the 1960s, has stood as a figure in trans history.

Sundance Film Festival said of the film: "Joynt's signature form-rupturing style radically reenvisions the imposition of the frame on the cultural memory of transness through his brilliantly crafted, communally-driven excavation. This reclamation tears away with remarkable precision the myth of isolation as the mode of existence of transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long."

Framing Agnes won both the Next Innovator Award and the Audience Award from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Two Sentence Horror Stories Alongside documentary features, Joynt has also directed an episode of Two Sentence Horror Stories (produced by The CW and available on Netflix) about a young transgender boy who is being bullied in high school. Joynt's episode was featured as part of an Emmy Awards campaign by Warner Bros. and TheWrap and won a Telly Award for Directing in 2022. That same year, Joynt was awarded the Dream Maker Award by the Cleveland International Film Festival, which recognized a "trailblazing director in contemporary LGBTQ cinema."

The Nest Made in collaboration with Julietta Singh and The National Film Board of Canada, The Nest is a feature-length documentary directed by Joynt. At the end of her mother's life, decolonial writer Julietta Singh returns to her childhood home in Manitoba, where her mother had lived for decades, following a serious health crisis. As she investigates the history of the house, she uncovers generations of women connected to it, including figures who confronted colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism.

State of Firsts

State of Firsts is a 2025 feature-length documentary that follows U.S. Representative Sarah McBride during her historic campaign and election as the first openly transgender member of the United States Congress. Filmed with immersive, behind-the-scenes access, the film captures McBride's navigation of political life amid public scrutiny, opposition, and the broader challenges of representation in contemporary American politics. The documentary also explores the personal and institutional pressures of being a "first," including a featured conversation between McBride and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on visibility, expectations, and political identity.

State of Firsts premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It will be presented in the Queer Cinema Today section of the 37th Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 2, 2026.

Short films Joynt's short films have screened internationally, winning the Jury Award for Best Documentary (Bengaluru), Jury Award for Best Short (Ecuador), Jury Award for Most Promising Filmmaker (Regent Park), Audience Award for Best Documentary Short (Seattle) and the EP Canada/ Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist (Toronto), Best Experimental Short (Los Angeles), Juror Award (Ann Arbor, Michigan), Audience Award for Best Documentary Short (Seattle).

Joynt's most well-known short films include Framing Agnes, Between You and Me, Genderize, I'm Yours, and Akin. The feature-length version of Framing Agnes is based on a short film of the same name (co-directed with Kristen Schilt) that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival.

Writing In 2016, Joynt and Mike Hoolboom coauthored the non-fiction book You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death and Transition. In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call 'second lives': Chase's transition from female to male and Mike's near-death from AIDS. Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations.

In September 2024, Joynt published his third book, titled Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir. Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them.

Teaching The opening of Joynt's self-description on the University of Victoria website reads: "After seeing my work in public, people often ask: "Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?" The boundaries, investments and tensions revealed by these questions are emblematic of my interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly pursuits." After his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and his Master of Arts at York University, in 2016 Joynt obtained his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from York University. Since 2019, Joynt has been an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria. Rooted in collaborative, practice-based research, Joynt's classes meet at the intersection of cultural productions and Gender Studies.