Ava DuVernay is one of most esteemed female directors working today. She has been nominated for many awards over the years!
So let’s dig into some trivia and facts about her!
- Her full name is Ava Marie DuVernay
- She was born in August 24, 1972
- She is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor
- Ava 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
- This made her the first black woman to win the award
- For her work on Selma (2014), DuVernay was the first black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award
- With Selma, she was also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture
- In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th (2016)
- DuVernay’s 2018 fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time, had a production and marketing budget between $150 million and $250 million
- Making her the first black-American woman to direct a live-action film with a budget of that size
- That film also made her the first black-American woman to direct a film that earned at least $100 million domestically
- Though the movie failed to turn a profit
- DuVernay is the creator, director and co-writer of the Netflix drama miniseries When They See Us
- The series is based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case
- The series premiered on May 31, 2019
- And received widespread acclaim upon its release
- DuVernay was raised with her four siblings, her mother, Darlene Maye, an educator, and her father, Murray Maye
- She grew up in Lynwood, California, which is near Compton
- During her summer vacations, she would travel to the childhood home of her father
- Which was not far from Selma, Alabama
- DuVernay said that these summers influenced the making of Selma
- As her father saw the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches
- In 1990, DuVernay graduated from Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood
- At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she was a double BA major in English literature and African-American studies
- In 2010 DuVernay founded African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM)
- Her own company to distribute films made by or focusing on black people
- DuVernay refers to AFFRM as “not so much a business, but a call to action”
- Although she sees building strong business foundations for films is a priority
- Ava DuVernay has said that she stresses that the driving force of the organization is activism
- In 2015 the company rebranded itself under the name ARRAY
- Promising a new focus on women filmmakers as well
- DuVernay also owns Forward Movement
- A film and television production company
- Michael T. Martin says, “DuVernay is among the vanguard of a new generation of black filmmakers who are the busily undeterred catalyst for what may very well be a black film renaissance in the making”
- He further speaks of DuVernay’s mission and “call to action” which constitutes a strategy “to further and foster the black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining”
- The “DuVernay test” is the race equivalent of the Bechdel test (for women in movies)
- As suggested by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in January 2016
- Asking whether “blacks and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories”
- It aims to point out the lack of people of color in Hollywood movies, through a measure of their importance to a particular movie or the lack of a gratuitous link to white actors
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