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 The Organizer: The Life of Bayard Rustin
Suggested by charlesthefifth
A movie about the life of Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin was an american Civil Rights and Gay Rights activist. Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania Bayard was heavily influenced by his Grandmother's Quaker Beliefs which included Civil Rights and Pacifism. He became an activist from an early age even joining the Communist Party as a youth but soon left over there support for World War II. He traveled to India where he studied non-violent protest and civil disobedience from Mahatma Gandhi himself. Later when he returned to America he continued his fight for Civil Rights. He met Martin Luther King Jr. and taught him the non-violent philosophy he learned from Gandhi. The two soon became allies and close friends in the struggle for civil rights as Bayard organized several important civil rights demonstrations. But their partnership and friendship suddenly ended in 1960 when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. a black minister and congressman from New York threatened that if King didn't cut all ties with Rustin he would reveal Rustin's 1953 arrest in Pasadena for having sex with another man in a parked car. It was an open secret in civil rights circles that Rustin was gay but this had been the first time a fellow civil rights activist had used that against him. He also threatened to tell the press that King and Rustin were gay lovers. King reluctantly agreed and distanced himself from Rustin who would later resign from the SCLC the organization he and King had founded. But Rustin was far from done with civil rights activism. Three years later Black Activists planned to March on Washington to protest segregation and there was only one logical choice over who should organize it. Bayard Rustin. Although Senator Strom Thurmond tried to discredit the march by calling Rustin a communist and a homosexual it didn't change anything. Thanks to his help the March on Washington went off without a hitch and became one of the most important moments in American History. Bayard would continue to fight for civil rights and eventually gay rights until his death in 1987.
