ASC Welcomes New Member Jomo Fray

Jomo Fray, ASC vividly recalls the moment he discovered cinematography, which he compares to “learning to breathe for the first time … I could truly communicate with other people. I could express emotions they could see and feel through the camera.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and an MFA in cinematography from New York University, he got a break when cinematographer Shawn Peters hired him as a camera trainee on a music video for R&B artist Cody Chesnutt. “I remember moving cases off the truck and bringing lenses to the ACs, covered in mud and soaked to the bone but feeling a joy I had never quite experienced. After wrap, Shawn was kind enough to sit down with me and go through every creative choice he had made on set that day — why he had approached each setup in the way that he had, and what sensation he was trying to evoke in the viewer with each choice …. Without hyperbole, I can say being on that set changed the course of my life.”

For his work on the period drama Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross, Fray won the ASC Spotlight Award and a Film Independent Spirit Award and received a Camerimage Golden Frog nomination. His feature credits include The Young Wife, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (for which he earned a Spirit Award nomination), Runner, No Future, Selah and the Spades and Port Authority.

He was named an AC Rising Star of Cinematography in 2022.

Find his website here and his Instagram here.

View the current ASC membership roster here.