Melina Matsoukas has always been guided by music.
The director and filmmaker is behind a number of culture-shifting projects from recent years, including her 2019 feature directorial debut, Queen and Slim, and Issa Rae’s hit series Insecure, of which she directed eight episodes. And her music videos and album visuals for the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Jennifer Lopez are among this millenium’s most iconic. (You need not look further than Beyoncé’s “Formation” video to understand her genius and influence.)
Now, in 2025, Matsoukas is eager to stretch her talents even further. She recently collaborated with the renowned composer Carlos Simon to craft the accompanying visuals for his transcendent symphony Good News Mass, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra debuted this week. She crafted the visual narrative with the help of her production company, De La Revolucion, and describes the effort as her first true art project and her first visual offering since welcoming her first child, a baby girl named Hazel, last year.
“I’ve always been intrigued by other forms of media and mediums. I primarily work in film and TV and obviously have a background in commercial and music videos, but I really wanted to expand my work into fine art, and I love collaborating with different artists,” Matsoukas tells Harper’s Bazaar. “It was such an amazing opportunity to work with Carlos. He’s so talented, and I’m a big fan of his work, and [this project] is like nothing I’ve ever done before. I like to constantly challenge myself as an artist, to create works in different spaces and with different narratives that still feel in line with my values and push me to continue to grow artistically.”
Simon’s Good News Mass is described as a “celebratory homage to Black joy, spiritual discovery, and the power of faith.” Accompanying the music are seven short videos from Matsoukas that reinterpret traditional iconography often found within Black churches and reflect on themes of loss, gratitude, hope, and resilience.
“When I got the music, I was just really inspired. I treated it how I treat every project, which is to get into the inspirations of the artist who created it,” Matsoukas explains. “I asked [Simon] where this [idea] came from and what was important for him. He grew up in the Black Pentecostal church, so that was really where the foundation for the entire symphony [stemmed from], and so obviously I wanted the visuals to follow suit.”
She continues, “When I started researching, I asked him, ‘What do you want this to feel like? What inspired it?’ And he said, ‘I want it to feel like God’s love in the room.’ ”
Creating the visuals wasn’t outside of Matsoukas’s wheelhouse, even though this project was far different from the other music-related credits on her résumé.
“Doing this took me back to my music-video days. It was a place that was familiar to me. I’ve also done visuals for other concerts, so I approached it in that same way. I could feel the love in that music, and I was really specific about making sure that when there was either an entire orchestra or a choir singing or performing, the visuals were more simplistic,” she says, “so they wouldn’t compete with what’s happening on the stage and then vice versa. This was definitely meant to be in collaboration with the music. Essentially, I’m the visual score for his symphony.”
And while Simon took inspiration from his own spiritual upbringing as a formative source for the musical material, Good News Mass is more meant to be a nondenominational sonic experience.
Matsoukas describes the visuals as a “modernized reinterpretation of religious iconography” that “gets into the highs and lows of where we are as a society.” Symphony attendees will see imagery that includes spiritually significant animals like sheep and doves, children sporting Converse sneakers and angel wings, and community elders dressed in their Sunday best. The individuals featured in the vignettes were hand-selected by Matsoukas’s casting partner, Anissa Williams, who went into local churches to find the perfect faces for the project.
“Obviously we have the little boys and girls. We also have, like, a lot of elders. In one piece, there’s a couple that’s just dancing on the street and lost in their own loving, very intimate moment,” she shares. “I wanted to showcase the span of age and have it feel that the people—socioeconomically—really represented us as a community.”
In one particular scene, a young Black girl dressed as if she’s heading to Sunday school sits on a stack of Bibles—the hefty, dictionary-width, hardcover kind that could be found in any everyday Black household. Later on, a halo starts to pulse above her head.
“[That scene] is called ‘Prayer of Thanksgiving,’ ” says Matsoukas. “And watching, you soon realize she’s somewhat my interpretation of an angel—because I think all Black women are angels.”
For Matsoukas, making the films for Good News Mass served as an experiment in visualizing spirituality. Both she and Simon wanted to craft a project that reminded the audience of the invaluable importance of community, especially today.
“I really was trying to delve into how people really find truth and love through God, and how is that interpreted through an image?” she says. “Whether you are a Christian or not—which I’m not—I think you can relate to the idea of a higher being and love being in our everyday universe and, from there, how that manifests itself within the visual language.”
The project as a whole is a visual exploration of how we need to rely on our inner joy and faith now more than ever. It’s also an ode to the shared Black experience, regardless of religion.
“I have such respect, love, admiration, and I get such inspiration from my people that I don’t really know how to make art in any other way,” the filmmaker shares. “It’s not necessarily about centering our joy, because it’s also about sometimes centering our struggles and our perseverance—all of it. I want to show us in ways that we haven’t seen before, and I want to pay my respects and honor the legacy from which I come from.”
“I really love my people,” she adds. “Sometimes it’s that simple.”
