Everett Kelsey

Everett N. Kelsey, Jr. is a Brooklyn-born actor, writer, and filmmaker whose career bridges the traditional craft of cinematic storytelling and the ethical challenges of the AI era. A former resident of Germany, Everett returned to the U.S. in the late 1990s and quickly immersed himself in the heart of Hollywood. In 2004, he founded Organic Polyester Productions, a creative studio through which his work-both in front of and behind the camera-has been featured in multiple Oscar-qualifying festivals, including Slamdance (twice), the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, Hollywood Black Film Festival (ABFF), Final Draft's "Big Break", and the Chicago AI Film Festival. Deeply influenced by his grandfather, Dr. George D. Kelsey-a professor, theologian, and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.-Everett views his creative and technological pursuits as a modern extension of a moral legacy grounded in civil rights, truth, and human dignity. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 reaffirmed that mission, prompting Everett to launch BLKMKT Media-a company dedicated to restoring narrative integrity and amplifying underrepresented voices-and voices overall, through ethical storytelling. Recognizing the urgent need to counteract the rise of algorithmically distorted and neurochemically manipulative content, Everett founded BLKMKT Tech and BLKMKT AI. BLKMKT stands for: Benevolent, LLM, Kaleidoscopic, Mankind, Knowledge, Technology. These ventures focus on leveraging frontier technologies to protect the authenticity of media-from script to screen to stream. At the core of this mission is the BAR (BLKMKT Authenticity Resonance) System, an AI-powered framework designed to evaluate, rate, and promote integrity in digital narratives, while combating racial caricatures, biased tropes, and manipulative content strategies. Everett is a vocal advocate for media that nurtures empathy, not fear-especially for young and marginalized audiences, who battles techno-racism. His work challenges the status quo of commercial content pipelines, which too often default to false binaries of hero and villain, flattening the complexity of lived experience. Instead, BLKMKT's projects are built around human-centered storytelling, cultural fluency, and technological accountability. Through BLKMKT Tech's rapidly expanding ecosystem-including its Ethnographic Repository, and BLKMKT AI's BAR System's AI-integrity tools for streaming platforms-Everett is helping shape a new foundation for media and storytelling in the age of artificial intelligence. His vision is not just to tell better stories-but to build the technical and ethical infrastructure to protect them in the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR).