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A director, producer, writer, marketer and film distributor, Ava DuVernay made her feature film debut with the documentary This is the Life (2008), a history on hip hop movement that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1990's. This was followed by series of television music documentaries which included My Mic Sounds Nice (2010) which aired on BET.
DuVernay's first narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), secured her the African-American Film Critics Association award for best screenplay. Her follow-up, Middle of Nowhere (2012) won the Best Director Prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award.- Writer
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Gina Prince-Bythewood (Writer/Producer/Director) studied at UCLA Film School, where she received the Gene Reynolds Scholarship for Directing and the Ray Stark Memorial Scholarship for Outstanding Undergraduate. She was a member of UCLA's track and field team, qualifying for the Pac-10 Championships in the triple jump.
Upon her graduation, she was hired as a writer on the television series "A Different World." She continued to write and produce for network television on series such as "Felicity," "South Central," and "Sweet Justice" before making the transition to directing.
Prince-Bythewood wrote and directed the widely-acclaimed feature film "Love and Basketball", which premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Prince-Bythewood won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay and a Humanitas Prize for her work on the film. She followed that success with the HBO film "Disappearing Acts."
In 2008, she wrote and directed the celebrated adaptation of the best-selling novel, "The Secret Life of Bees." The film won two People's Choice Awards and two NAACP Image Awards. Her third feature "Beyond the Lights" came in 2014 and garnered an Oscar nomination for best song and landed on a number of top critics Best of 2014 lists including the NY Times, Washington Post and Vulture.
She is the first Black woman to direct a superhero film, "The Old Guard," based on the celebrated graphic novel by Greg Rucka for Skydance and Netflix. It premiered on Netflix July 10, 2020 to record ratings, and 6th most popular film of all-time on Netflix.
Prince-Bythewood, along with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood, created and produced "Shots Fired," a ten hour special event series for Fox, which premiered in 2017. TIME magazine praised, "An achievement...a testament to how ambitious even broadcast television has become."
She directed the pilot for the Marvel series "Cloak and Dagger" starring Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph, which debuted to record ratings for Freeform. She directed the pilot for the ABC limited event series "Women of the Movement," about Mamie and Emmett Till which is currently at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
She directed the feature film "The Woman King" for Tri-Star and Sony. The historical epic action drama features an amazing ensemble including Oscar-winner Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, John Boyega, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim and Adrienne Warren, releasing theatrically September of 2022.
She is proud to fund a scholarship for African American students in UCLA's film program. She resides in Southern California with her husband Reggie and their amazing sons, Cassius and Toussaint.- Actress
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Shola Lynch is known for Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2012), Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) and Untitled Yusuf D Jackson/Yucaipa Companies Project. She has been married to Vincent Morgan since 1 September 2006.- Producer
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Tracy Heather Strain is known for American Experience (1987), Unnatural Causes (2008) and American Masters (1985).- Director
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Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set at a historically black school, focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With his School Daze (1988) profits, Lee went on to make his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie based specifically his own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed the racial tensions that emerge in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood on one very hot day. The movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, for Danny Aiello for supporting actor, and sparked a debate on racial relations. Lee went on to produce and direct the jazz biopic Mo' Better Blues (1990), the first of many Spike Lee films to feature Denzel Washington, including the biography of Malcolm X (1992), in which Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on He Got Game (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of college athletic recruiting, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man (2006). Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his participation in Lumière and Company (1995), the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997), to his Peabody Award-winning biographical adaptation of Black Panther leader in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), through his 2005 Emmy Award-winning examination of post-Katrina New Orleans in When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and its follow-up five years later If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010). Through his production company 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Lee continues to create and direct both independent films and projects for major studios, as well as working on story development, creating an internship program for aspiring filmmakers, releasing music, and community outreach and support. He is married to Tonya Lewis Lee, and they have two sons, Satchel and Jackson.- Producer
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Lena Waithe was born on 17 May 1984 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She is a producer and writer, known for Master of None (2015), Ready Player One (2018) and Queen & Slim (2019). She has been married to Alana Mayo since November 2019.- Director
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Director. Writer. Producer. Actor. Poet. He studied history, literature and theatre for some time, but didn't finish it and founded instead his own film production company in 1963. Later in his life, Herzog also staged several operas in Bayreuth, Germany, and at the Milan Scala in Italy. Herzog has won numerous national and international awards for his poetic feature and documentary films.- Director
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Albert and Allen Hughes began making movies at age 12, but their formal film education began their freshman year of high school when Allen took a TV production class. They soon made a short film entitled How To Be A Burglar and people began to take notice. Their next work, Uncensored videos, was broadcast on cable, introducing them to a wider audience. After high school Albert began taking classes at LACC Film School: two shorts established the twins' reputation as innovative filmmakers and allowed them to direct Menace II Society (1993), which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and grossed nearly 10 times as much as its $3 million budget. After following up with Dead Presidents (1995) they directed the feature-length documentary American Pimp (1999).- Producer
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Barry Jenkins was born on 19 November 1979 in Miami, Florida, USA. He is a producer and director, known for If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), Moonlight (2016) and Aftersun (2022).- Producer
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Liz Garbus was born on 11 April 1970 in the USA. She is a producer and director, known for What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015), The Farm: Angola, USA (1998) and Becoming Cousteau (2021). She is married to Dan Cogan. They have two children.