Ava DuVernay
Ava Marie DuVernay (/ˌdjuːvərˈneɪ/;[1] born August 24, 1972) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. She is a recipient of a Primetime Emmy Award, two NAACP Image Award, a BAFTA Film Award, and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee of an Academy Award and Golden Globe. In 2011, she founded her independent distribution company ARRAY.
Ava DuVernay
- Director
- producer
- screenwriter
- film publicist
After making her directoral debut, 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,[2] becoming the first black woman to win the award.[3]
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.[4][5] 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 budget of $100 million. 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.[6] In 2020, she was elected to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences board of governors as part of the directors branch.[7][8]
Early life and education[edit]
Ava Marie DuVernay was born on August 24, 1972, in Long Beach, California. She was raised by her mother, Darlene (née Sexton), an educator, and her stepfather, Murray Maye.[9] The surname of her biological father, Joseph Marcel DuVernay III, originates with Louisiana Creole ancestry.[10] She grew up in Lynwood, California. She has four siblings.
During her summer vacations, she would travel to the childhood home of her stepfather, which was not far from Selma, Alabama.[11] DuVernay said that these summers influenced the making of Selma, as her father had witnessed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.[12]
Raised Catholic, in 1990 DuVernay graduated from Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood.[13][14] At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she was a double BA major in English literature and African-American studies. Ava is an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[15][16][17][18]
In 2021, DuVernay was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University.[19]
Career[edit]
1991–2008: Early work[edit]
Despite the acclaim DuVernay has garnered in the film and television industries, she did not pick up a camera until she was 32.[20] DuVernay's first interest was in journalism, a choice influenced by an internship with CBS News. She was assigned to help cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial.[16] DuVernay became disillusioned with journalism, however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies. She opened her own public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency, also known as DVAPR, in 1999.[21]
Through DVAPR she provided marketing and PR services to the entertainment and lifestyle industry, working on campaigns for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls.[15][16][18][22][23][24][25]
Other ventures launched by DuVernay include Urban Beauty Collective, a promotional network that began in 2003 and had more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops in 16 U.S. cities, expanded to 20 in 2008. They were mailed a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion program called UBC-TV,[26][27] the African-American blog hub Urban Thought Collective in 2008, Urban Eye, a two-minute long weekday celebrity and entertainment news show distributed to radio stations,[28] and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.[29]
In 2005, over the Christmas holiday, DuVernay decided to take $6,000 and make her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life.[18][30] Based on her mother's experiences,[18] the 12-minute film was about an uplifting trip by a struggling single mother (Melissa De Sousa) and her three kids to a local Los Angeles discount grocery store. The film toured the festival circuit and was broadcast on February 6, 2007, as part of Showtime's Black Filmmaker Showcase.
DuVernay next explored making documentaries, because they can be done on a smaller budget than fiction films, and she could learn the trade while doing so.[31] In 2007, she directed the short Compton in C Minor, for which she "challenged herself to capture Compton in only two hours and present whatever she found." The following year, she made her feature directorial debut with the alternative hip hop documentary This Is the Life, a history of LA's Good Life Cafe's arts movement, in which she participated as part of the duo Figures of Speech. This is the Life won audience awards at the ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, the Hollywood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle.[32]
Podcast and public speaking[edit]
In September 2013, DuVernay started a podcast series called The Call-In,[121] a series of phone conversations recorded by AFFRM of Black filmmakers of feature narrative and documentary work. DuVernay talks about her goals with The Call-In: "For people of color and women filmmakers, so often the questions we get asked are about being a woman or a person of color. So The Call-In was a space where we could just talk about craft."[122]
On October 27, 2013, DuVernay gave one of the Executive Keynote addresses for Film Independent, a non-profit organization that produces the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, at their 2013 Film Independent Form, a three-day event. She was one of two keynote speakers along with the chief executive officer of Netflix, Ted Sarandos.[123]
DuVernay, in a keynote address[124] at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival,[125][126] shared that she was the seventh person asked to direct Selma[127] and described her experience at the 2015 Oscars, while being an honor to attend, was just "a room in L.A."[128]
In February 2018 it was announced that DuVernay, along with producer Dan Lin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, had launched the Evolve Entertainment Fund. The fund's mission is to promote inclusion and provide an opportunity for under-served communities to pursue a dream in the entertainment industry.[129]
Since May 2019, DuVernay has cohosted The Essentials, a weekly film series on Turner Classic Movies, with Ben Mankiewicz. DuVernay has appeared in wraparounds each Saturday night on the channel, discussing a wide range of films, including Marty, Ashes and Embers, Harlan County, USA and La Pointe Courte.[130]