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 Passing Shadows: The Life of Nella Larsen
Suggested by kamsismith
Nella Larsen was born to a Danish immigrant mother and a West Indian father in turn-of-the-century Chicago—a society that forced her to live on the fringes of both Black and white communities. Our miniseries begins here, where her journey as a young woman struggling with her identity amid polarized racial lines unfolds. Each episode dives into a key chapter of Larsen’s life. Her experience as a nurse in a segregated hospital, her volatile marriage to a prominent Black physicist, and her shift to Harlem—where she encounters luminaries like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. Du Bois—provide the backdrop for her evolution into a writer. As she turns to literature, she pens works that address the complexities of racial "passing," alienation, and the psychological toll of societal pressures, capturing the voices of countless people caught between worlds. Through flashbacks and moody, jazz-laden settings, we explore the inner conflicts that fueled her groundbreaking novels, Quicksand and Passing. Her works inspire admiration but also envy and accusations of plagiarism—a blow that nearly destroys her career and sends her into obscurity. Through her struggles, the miniseries will resonate with anyone who has ever felt torn between communities or caught in society’s expectations.
