Was member of the dramatic jury at the Sundance Film Festival in
2001.
She has appeared in one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: The Silence of the Lambs (1991). She has also directed one film that is in the registry: Eve's Bayou (1997).
On the show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2012), she discovered that her patrilineal great-great-great-grandfather was likely born in Africa, and was brought to the U.S. in the early 1800s. His son Primus believed the family name to have already been "Lemons," or a variation, in Africa.
It was uncovered in a 2021 episode of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2012) that Lemmons' third-great-grandfather was transported to the United States from Africa in the slave trade, and that she is also a distant relative of actor Kevin Bacon.
She is the daughter of Dorothy Othello (Stallworth), a counselor and psychologist, and Milton Francis Lemmons, a biology teacher. She was raised mostly in Boston.