JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – When discussing Raines High School alumni, you typically hear about the athletes who have had professional careers, but this creative is blazing her own trail while representing Jacksonville in the entertainment industry.
Feeding a creative spark
ZJ Jackson remembers the teachers at Raines High School who fed a creative spark that would carry her from local stages to film sets with some of Hollywood’s biggest names.
“I tell people you’re born creative…and then you learn all the other things,” Jackson said.
She said from a young age, her mother put her into acting, modeling and performing arts. Originally, she wanted to go to the Douglas School of Arts but she chose Raines for its partnership with the University of Florida that offered a scholarship through the ACE program for students who met certain requirements.
It turned out to be the right choice for her creative spirit.
“I kept telling my chorus teacher, ‘I really want to be an actress and he would bring me to practice every day and set me to the side and teach me acting skills, shout out to Mr. Osborn,” she said.
Jackson said Mr. Osborn is one of the adults in her life who did wonders for her confidence.
“Twice a year, they do this grand chorus Viking show and they let me do a monologue at the show so I became the local thespian. We did a Martin Luther King Day assembly and they were like, ‘We need the local thespian to come do a monologue,’” she said.
Florida to Hollywood
Jackson began college as a theater major at UF but switched to the journalism school after deciding she no longer wanted to pursue acting. An immersive class in TV and radio production opened a new path. She worked in radio in Gainesville and told one of her colleagues that she wanted to live in L.A. The pandemic hit and the station was forced to downsize so they let her go.
“I get a phone call from California from HGTV and a lady said, ‘Hi, my brother said that you live in California.’ I’m sitting in Jacksonville and I said, ‘Yeah, I live in California,’ and she’s like, ‘well my brother has raved about you. He worked at the radio station with you and we have a job at HGTV for an associate producer position, if you’re interested,” Jackson said.
From there, she only had 30 days to figure out how to get from Jacksonville to California. That same day, her mother told her that she was going to relocate to North Carolina. Jackson could move with her mother, but she still had a decision to make. But that was before a wrench was thrown into her plans.
“So I went through the process of interviewing with every [HGTV] executive, they loved me, they offered me the job and on day 28 of 30, they called me and said, ‘We’re so sorry, we gave your job away to somebody in network,’ and I went back down to the river and cried,” she said.
Her uncle told her that he would help her for 60 days if she still wanted to take a chance. So she packed up her Nissan, drove cross-country to L.A. and found a tiny house to live in and started hustling.
She called her 9th-grade English teacher, Dr. Mathis, who had moved to California, for help. Mathis connected Jackson with JaSheika and JaNeika James, who were writers on the TV show “Empire.”
“In L.A., I was holding a cup saying, ‘Will work for food,’ whatever you got, I’ll do it,” she said.
Paying dues and earning credits
Connections to writers and a local group of Black filmmakers led to assistant and production roles on independent projects. Jackson said those early jobs taught her nearly every on-set role — from assistant director and location manager to producing and even craft services.
Her versatility helped her transition to larger projects. She said she worked on a film with Nicolas Cage and has credits on projects for Netflix and Hulu like “The Residence.”
She credited her success to the adults in her life, helping her believe that nothing was impossible or out of reach to her.
“If you have a plan A and you create a plan B, then you don’t have a plan,” she said. You’re planning for plan B, but if you have a plan A and plan B is the only option, then you don’t have a choice but to succeed in that real so my family, my mom, the teachers that I had, they never made me feel like the dream that I had, no matter how big it was, like I needed a plan B, so it allowed me to thrive in it.”
Jackson said she tells younger people trying to break into the industry that they need to stand firm and don’t minimize themselves and their abilities when introducing themselves.
“A lot of people will be like, ‘Oh, I’m a writer or I’m this, I’m a that,’ but I’ll say ‘no you’re a writer,’” she said. “That’s what you told me, you’re a writer…and stay in that. Introduce yourself as that when you’re in a room. Don’t settle for anything less.”
Jackson said that if someone introduces themselves as a writer, she will consider that person if she has a writer’s opportunity.
“What you do in the world has to conform to that,” she said. “You don’t have to conform to the world so again, I was blessed to have a lot of adults in my life who did not make me have to conform to be anything other than what I thought I was.”
She encouraged creatives to hone in on a skill so you can master it. She said she didn’t even realize she wanted to be a director until she was two years into the industry and she had tried everything by that point.
How Jacksonville’s culture influences her
Jackson said Jacksonville and the city’s culture made her who she is.
“I was the only girl in the school who was interested in theater so I was like against the norm and so everybody didn’t really see me as a star or expect that I would have this trajectory in my life,” she said. “I’ve filmed all over the world. When I’m anywhere, I’ll tell people I’m a Florida girl at heart. I’ll show up and I’ll do your thing but please know my city made me like my culture.”
She said she wants to do more for Jacksonville. She tries her best to make sure the city shows up in her work. Jackson has even mentored a Raines student who is interested in the entertainment industry.
“I tell people all the time I have an audience of one,” Jackson said. “If I touch one person with anything that I do, then I’ve done my job…”
She talked about how Mr. Osborn poured into her as the only kid in the school with a deep interest in performance arts.
“…he still made that time and that’s why it means so much to me because I was not told that this was possible,” she said.
She also wrote, produced and directed smaller projects available on streaming platforms, including a short inspired by the death of her older sister titled “4 to 6 Seconds,” which explores how split-second decisions can change lives.
Jackson said her work draws on influences such as John Singleton, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. “I tell my actors… I don’t want you to be on script. I almost don’t touch the script for the first half of the rehearsal process. I really need you to become this person,” she said of her directing approach.
Her biggest local project to date is “Deon,” which she is directing and producing in Jacksonville. Jackson said the production has secured an investor and local partnerships for locations and vendors, and casting is scheduled to begin next month with filming projected for the end of summer.
“We’re really looking for the city to come out and show us what they’re made of because this is their project too,” she said, noting the production plans to include Jacksonville talent and businesses.
Jackson emphasized the variety of careers available in film beyond acting.
“If you like cooking, you can be a chef on set. There’s someone cutting hair. There’s costume designers. Sound engineers make a lot of money,” she said, urging young people to identify and claim their creative roles. “Introduce yourself. When you’re in a room, be in the room.”
She said the schools and community at Raines — with its strong cultural and creative traditions at the time she attended — helped shape her.
“It immersed us in Black culture and Black excellence and Black creativity,” she said. Jackson added that she measures success by impact: “I have an audience of one. If I touch one person with anything that I do, I’ve done my job.”
Jackson encouraged local creatives interested in working on Deon to reach out once the project’s official channels are launched. For now, she said people can contact the team by direct message or email once the production pages go live. Contact her at zjjackson@216ent.com