STORY · GLOBAL
In front of the camera: the video vixen's own account
Probable
When Jamaican video vixens talk about the job themselves, the story is less about spectacle than about bookings, contracts and a path into other work.
Two Jamaican video vixens have spoken on the record about what the work is actually like, giving a rare first-person account of a role dancehall has usually described from the outside.
Not the video light
Dancehall has always demanded to be seen: from VHS-era stage-show tapes traded through Jamaica and the diaspora, through DVD compilations, into what the trade press now calls the music-video era of purpose-shot, YouTube-ready clips. Somewhere in that arc a distinct role took shape — the video vixen or video model, a woman cast to appear in a produced video — worth separating from video light culture, the older street-dance practice of amateur videographers filming patrons for a fee. One is a booked, professional role in a produced shoot; the other is being caught, willingly or not, on a dance floor. Dancehall studies scholars Donna P. Hope and Sonjah Stanley Niaah have both written about the politics of visibility running through the genre's visual culture, without collapsing the two practices into one story.
Feliciti: choosing the bookings
Most of what gets written about video vixens is written about them, not with them. Feliciti, who grew up around Kingston's Maxfield community, is part of a small recent shift: a 2025 Jamaica Star profile followed her from steady video-vixen bookings — work she has described choosing more selectively over time — into her own recording career, built around singles including 'Pon It.' The move from being cast in someone else's video to directing her own image is, on the evidence of her own account, the point of the story, not an afterthought to it.
Trisha Burke: a craft without a contract
Trisha Burke's account, given to Jamaica Star in 2023, is less about a single breakout moment than about the day-to-day economics of the work: no standard contract, payment that does not always match the ask, and — in her own framing — a field she does not experience as competitive, since visibility and consistency tend to bring their own bookings. Her account and Feliciti's do not agree on every point, but both describe a job with real terms, real choices and real leverage, not simply a camera pointed at a passive subject.
The trade press is only beginning to record dancehall's video culture in the first person, rather than only writing about its subjects.
That first-person record stays deliberately thin here: this history names only women who have chosen, on the record, to describe the work themselves. What it already shows is a role that is neither the simple exploitation nor the simple glamour dancehall's audiences have sometimes projected onto it, but — on the participants' own account — a craft with its own rules, risks and rewards, still waiting for a fuller telling.