Jamie DeWolf

JAMIE DEWOLF is a performer, filmmaker, showman, teacher, and artist from Oakland, CA.
With a free-wheeling career that began in his teens, Jamie first became known to Bay Area audiences as a performance poet, winning his first slam competition in 1999. Known for his fast paced mix of stand up, theater and hip hop, he went on to become the National Poetry Slam Champion, the Oakland and Berkeley Grand Slam Champion, and was a featured performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, 60 Minutes, UPN and CBS. Awarded “Best Poet” of the Bay Area by the East Bay Express two years in a row, Jamie is also a mentor for Youth Speaks, the nation’s leading presenter of Spoken Word education. He’s performed and lead writing workshops at over 130 universities, high schools and juvenile detention centers across the U.S, and hosted the first-ever slam poetry competition at San Quentin Penitentiary.
As a member of The Suicide Kings performance trio (with fellow poets Geoff Trenchard and Rupert Estanislao), Jamie’s toured the country with acts ranging in diversity from Sage Francis, B. Dolan and The Dwarves. The Suicide Kings were the recipients of various grants, from the National Performance Network Creation Commission, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the City of Oakland to write In Spite of Everything, described by the East Bay Express as “a poignant, chilling, knockout of a play…that beautifully incorporates their visceral verse into the brutal narrative of a school shooting”. The three-man show premiered at the Living Word Festival in 2007 and toured world-wide, performing in such major cities as New York, Washington D.C., and Moscow, Russia. It was listed as one of the “Top Ten Plays of the Year” by East Bay Express, and resulted in the Telly-Award winning short film directed by DeWolf, Ricochet In Reverse.
A filmmaker since his teens, Jamie has written and directed many short films, including Safe, Dear Susan: A Strychnine Noir, and Chasing Charlemagne, the SF State first prize winner. He has also directed music videos for such a variety of artists, including Forrest Day, SuperEgo and the Hobo Gobbelins. He directed the short documentaries Certified Beasts: Hickman Homes, Life as Text, and continues to shoot documentaries and PSA’s for the Bigger Picture Project, an acclaimed, statewide series of films on Diabetes. Jamie is also the writer and co-director of his first full-length feature film Smoked, a dark comedy about a cannabis club robbery, which was chosen to premiere at the Oakland Underground Film Festival in 2012 and the PollyGrind Film Festival in Las Vegas the same year, also chosen to be part of the first ever Rio Grind Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada. Jamie’s films have been featured on a variety of websites including UpWorthy and Good.com. Jamie is also the co-creator of the Screamfest Horror Film Festival and the host of the East Bay’s Erotic Short Film Festival.
As the host and creator of Tourettes Without Regrets, an acclaimed Bay Area variety show, Jamie was awarded “Best of the Bay” by the SF Guardian and the “Best Underground Cultural Event” by the East Bay Express. The show features a freestyle battle, circus performers, comedians and wild contests. One of the most in-demand hosts in the Bay Area, Jamie is known for his interactive style and games involving the entire audience. In addition to Tourettes (which runs the first Thursday of every month in Oakland, CA), he continues to host events across the country, including festivals such as Symbiosis, Folsom Street Fair and Art and Soul, as well as large-scale circus productions with the Vau de Vire Society. Jamie has also guest hosted a variety of shows, including The Church of Love and Ruin, Red Hots Burlesque, and Cabaret Perilous.
The great-grandson of Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard, Jamie is an outspoken critic of the church. He has been interviewed by Inside Edition, the Young Turks, CBS, BBC and NBC. He was the host of the first ever anti Scientology summit in Clearwater, Florida and was a keynote speaker at the first international conference in Dublin, Ireland. His live NPR performance about his lineage entitled “The God and the Man” was awarded Snap Judgment’s “Performance of the Year” and quickly became a viral hit, garnering national press from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
Jamie is currently working on new screenplays, a one man show and is a producer for NPR’s storytelling show Snap Judgment. He is always looking for new ways to expand as an artist and filmmaker.