Jailbirds in Flight
Janiya
joy · laughter · movement
The unbreakable brightness of youth.
Please take a moment before you continue.
Janiya walks into a room the way morning walks into a window. She is young enough to still be surprised by her own life, and old enough to know exactly what has been asked of her. What is remarkable is not that she has survived—many have—but the light she has refused to trade for it. She still laughs first, still trusts, still lets herself want things out loud. Spend ten minutes with her and you will remember how much of adulthood is quiet forgetting, and how much can be recovered by simply being near someone who has not yet forgotten.
Get to know Janiya
A short film in the Jailbirds in Flight series. Please watch, if you can, in one sitting.
An AI-generated film portrait based primarily on scenes and language from Jailbirds in Flight. All imagery and voice are AI-generated; no real footage or recording of Janiya appears.
A passage with Janiya
From Nicole's writing — a scene as it happened.
This one might be beyond my pay grade, ran through my mind, as the Black girl with cornrows and no comprehension of indoor volume twerked her way past my bunk, fast-talking to Luciana.
"I fuckin' love watches. I just love 'em."
I poke my head out from under my "eye mask," which is really just a sweatshirt, to see Rachel doing the same from her bunk two down.
"Good for you," Luciana says, in perfect prison-etiquette language. Translation: Get out of my row. and I don't want any problems.
Seeing she now has an audience, Janiya somehow finds a way to turn herself up louder. "Yeah, you know me, I'm a ho—but not a cheap ho. I need them watches."
This is a new category of ho for me. Not a shoe ho. Not a bag ho. A watch ho. A Rolex ho. "Okay, yes, thank you for letting us know," Luciana says in the exact tone of someone politely closing the door on a religious pamphlet they did not request.
I could take a page out of this woman's book. Janiya is completely unfazed by Luciana's please evaporate energy. If anything, she's more energized now that she's picked up two extra spectators. She's moved on to karaoke twerking, shimmying through movie soundtracks and landing on Grease. She looks my way.
"You know that one?"
I glance to either side as if to ask, Are you talking to me? Yes. She is talking to me. "I do," I say, and somehow manage to sound like a 1950s librarian answering a reference question. "I do that one for my baby, my son," she says. "People tell me to leave his daddy, but I ain't goin' nowhere."
Within three minutes of meeting her, I know more about her love life than I know about some of my closest friends on the outside. Most people reveal this level of detail somewhere around week twelve of therapy. Janiya offers it before I have fully sat up in bed.
Now, I might be reserved, but I marvel at the sheer social athleticism of it all. Can you really wake up a stranger with your ass in motion, not know their name, and then slide right into the kind of confession most people save for a locked diary? If you're Janiya, you can.
And if you're Janiya, you can also make a white woman in the early days of her prison stay fall completely in love with you, even when she wakes you up in the middle of the night.
What did Janiya awaken in you?
Written responses become part of the exhibition's guestbook.
If Janiya met you where you stand, pass her forward.
Adjacent rooms
Move through the exhibition, one portrait at a time.