Farrah Hoffmire
Farrah Hoffmire grew up in Summerville, SC, and earned her degree from the College of Charleston.
Hoffmire began a career as a social services worker but found her attention shifting elsewhere. She started a second career as a painter in the 1990s, worked as a yoga instructor to pay the bills, and eventually became well known in Charleston’s eclectic art circles. Hoffmire and her husband, technology and media entrepreneur Mitchell Davis, moved to Seattle in 2005 after the acquisition of BookSurge by Amazon.com. She took advantage of the city’s filmmaking resources, working as an intern for an alternative television station and a multimedia art center. Equipped with new technical skills and her emerging ideas about short film, Hoffmire began looking for subjects that reflected her interests and values.
The project that would become Falling Together in New Orleans, her first feature-length film, began when the unfolding tragedy along the Gulf Coast drew her south again in September 2005. Hoffmire made several follow-up trips to New Orleans, and the resulting film – structured as a series of vignettes – focused on the efforts of individual volunteers and survivors. Many of the perspectives portrayed in the documentary clash with the institutional “master narrative” provided by mainstream media.
Though Hoffmire and Davis grew up in the same town and attended the same college, the couple didn’t actually become acquainted until they were well into their adult lives. Today, they are the principals in Organic Process Productions, LLC, the independent production company they founded in 2005. Hoffmire is involved in multiple short film projects for OPP, as well as the Hurricane Katrina Campus Media Project, an ongoing multimedia tour that serves to draw attention to the situation in New Orleans’ devastated low-income wards.
Hoffmire’s creative work draws from the same spiritual source that originally led her to a career in mental health and social services. “I continue to be inspired by Mitchell, other artists, activists, and those who dare to be different,” she said.