Age: 53
female
Ava Marie DuVernay (/ˌdjuːvərˈneɪ/; born August 24, 1972) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. She is a recipient of two Primetime Emmy Awards, two NAACP Image Awards, a BAFTA Film Award, and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. In 2011, she founded her independent distribution company ARRAY. After making her directorial debut with I Will Follow (2010), DuVernay won the directing award in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film, Middle of Nowhere, becoming the first black woman to win the award. For her work on Selma (2014), a biopic about Martin Luther King Jr., DuVernay became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director; the film went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Her other film credits include the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary 13th (2016) and the Disney fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time (2018), the latter making her the first African-American woman to direct a film with a $100 million budget. In 2023, she directed the biographical film Origin based on Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). DuVernay's television credits include the OWN drama series Queen Sugar (2016) and two Netflix drama limited series: When They See Us (2019), based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case, and Colin in Black & White (2021), based on the teenage years of NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In 2017, DuVernay was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2020, she was elected to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences board of governors as part of the directors branch. Description above from the Wikipedia article Ava DuVernay, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Ava DuVernay
Director
for Director in Jelly Roll: The Birth of Jazz
Suggested by kamsismith
Take a journey into the smoky parlors of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where the syncopated rhythms of a new sound were being born. Jelly Roll: The Birth of Jazz is a gripping, six-episode biopic miniseries that chronicles the extraordinary life of Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz and one of its first great architects. Born to a Creole family, Morton’s journey is one of genius, ambition, and controversy. From the raucous brothels of Storyville, where he honed his craft as a ragtime and blues pianist, to the grand stages of Chicago, New York, and beyond, Morton’s meteoric rise as jazz’s first arranger—and one of its most complex characters—is set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America. The series delves into Morton’s triumphs, including the publication of “Jelly Roll Blues,” one of the first notated jazz compositions, and his role in transforming jazz from a local phenomenon into a global art form. It also explores his struggles, from the racism and colorism he faced as a Creole man, to his clashes with other jazz pioneers, to his later years as his fame dimmed, but his influence endured.
