My friend Jennifer Venditti has been an inspiration to me since our first meeting a decade ago in New York.  She is one of those friends who I don’t talk to every week but when we do, the stories unfold. We have trips to documentary film festivals behind us and many a trip ahead of us I am sure. (Taos is next on the agenda.)

I met Jennifer at the time I had just started working on what would become Alabama Chanin.  She had a growing casting agency and also worked on a line of clothing with our friend Molly Stern-Schlussel, called M.R.S. (More about our upcoming collaboration with Molly and M.R.S coming soon.)

Jennifer is often credited with changing the face of beauty over the last ten years, mostly due to her unerring eye and a diligence for street casting. She has transformed “unusual beauty” into mainstream beauty in a decade of work, not to mention directing and producing an award winning documentary film called Billy the Kid that speaks to what it means to be an outsider.

At one point in the film, Billy says, “I’m not black, I’m not white, I’m not foreign… I’m just different in the mind…”

Did I mention that Jennifer was named one of the  “Top 25 New Faces in Film” by Filmmaker Magazine?

Recently, she launched a new Tumblr page that documents her past and continuing search for beauty: Human Kinds.

I adore how she sees faces and finds beauty in the most unusual places.  And I loved (and laughed out loud about) this post titled Arrested Beauty – partially inspired by one of our local newspapers that we bought at a mini-mart on her trip to Alabama this past summer: Hard Times: Busted in the Shoals (see image below).

Visit Human Kinds and Arrested Beauty.
xoNatalie