Seeking Mavis Beacon

Filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross film their DIY investigation to uncover the woman behind the face of ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’, an educational software programme developed in the 1980s.

Its defining features permanently live on in the filmmakers’ collective memory - the elegant, smiling Black woman in the cream suit marching off to her high-rise job on the cover of the package and the Black hands with 3inch - long acrylic fingernails, overlaid on the screen that clattered as Beacon typed in tandem with her users. Retailers in the 80s were convinced a software programme featuring a dark-skinned Black woman wouldn’t sell, but it ended up becoming one of the most successful and lucrative educational products of all time. 

What became of the influential cover model who vanished decades ago? Their sleuthing uncovers a shocking revelation. What follows leads Jones and Ross to question, in the age of AI and technological omnipresence, who does our image really belong to?