William Stephen Davis is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community builder from the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina.

With a background in photography, film studies, and interdisciplinary studies, his work has been featured nationally and internationally in galleries including the Yale School of Art Gallery, TS1 Gallery and KIT Museum, and festivals including Indie Grits, HollyShorts, RAW Film Festival, South London Shorts, Lisbon International, Hong Kong Arthouse, Bucharest ShortCut CineFest, Cardiff Mini, Hell’s Half Mile, and NewFilmmakers NY, among others.

A self-taught filmmaker, fine artist, writer, and musician, his multimodal approach to art often incorporates found and primary source materials within collage, sound, installation ,and moving image works. He has guest lectured at academic institutions including Duke, Glamorgan (Wales), Iowa, UNC Greensboro, East Tennessee State, South Carolina, and partnered with numerous community organizations via conferences, festivals, workshops, and events.

As a community builder, he has directed over three dozen film festivals and public arts events, served as Festival Director of the Joedance Film Festival (which raised hundreds of thousands in rare pediatric cancer research), as well as a board member of the Charlotte Film Society where he developed  and acted as Program Director of the Charlotte Film Lab filmmaker screening series. He has organized numerous arts-based community initiatives in his Appalachian hometown for underserved populations including Film and Photography Camps. He has worked nearly two decades toward his ongoing passion to utilize art as a tool for community engagement, personal empowerment, and social mobility.

Through explorations of the invisible layers we construct and imagine that connect and hide us from others, the private worlds we build within our own lives (seen and unseen), the complex, layered nature of experience and our romantic desire to develop memory and mystery, his personal, creative and academic studies have spanned Appalachia, his home state of North Carolina and the US and internationally to Finland, Iceland, Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Canada, Peru, Thailand, and Cambodia.

He is a Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, multiple Knight Foundation and Arts & Science Council grantee, feral cat tamer, Eagle Scout, father of two, and magical collector.

He currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina where he is Founder and Creative Director of Small Creatures, a production company + artist accelerator organization (Small Creatures), musician (Rasmus Leon) and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He is available virtually and in-person for workshops, presentations, consultations, and community-centric collaborations.