Black HerStory Month Day 12
Powerhouse, Innovator, Producer, and filmmaker SHE is an absolute Badass! The Long Beach, California native, was born on August 24, 1972. Raised by Her mother, Darlene, who was an educator, and her stepfather, Murray Maye. This Queen has Creole ancestral ties originating in Louisiana, thanks to her biological father, Joseph Marcel DuVernay III. I am SUREEEE by now you know who this GORGEOUS Loc’d Queen is!! and My GAHAD she is Beautiful! She is THE Ms. Ava DuVernay!
How It Started: As a little girl, summer vacations were spent at the childhood home of her father in Alabama. He grew up not too far from Selma. He witnessed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. Ava says those summers were the inspiration for her 2014 film, Selma. In 1990, Ava graduated from Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood. She went on to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Go, Bruins! Ava was a double B.A. major in English literature and African-American studies, and she also is an honorary member of the #OhSoPretty 🧡 Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated 💚!!!
Thanks to an internship with CBS News, where she was assigned to cover the OJ Simpson Murder Trial, DuVernay took an interest in journalism. The infatuation faded, so she dabbled with public relations. She worked as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other P.R. agencies. Later she would open her public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency (DVAPR), in 1999. Through DVAPR, she provided marketing and P.R. services for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls! Girl You Just, Whew Lawd!!
In 2003 She launched the Urban Beauty Collective, a promotional network featuring more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops across 20 U.S. cities. Other ventures included 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, and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.
“I’ve passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it’s not happening to you; it’s happening for you.”
In 2005, DuVernay took $6,000 to make her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life. The story of a struggling single mother and her three kids who took a trip to a local Los Angeles discount grocery store. The film toured the festival circuit and aired on Showtime for their Black Filmmaker Showcase. In 2007, she directed the short film Compton in C Minor, and the next year she made her feature directorial debut. The feature documentary This Is the Life is a history of L.A.'s Good Life Cafe's art movement. In 2011, DuVernay's first narrative feature film, I Will Follow, was released in theatres. It became an official selection of Pan-African Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Chicago International Film Festival. But the fire didn’t stop there!
Jay Z and Beyonce…. She has directed commercials for Apple Music and Miu Miu and her music video for the Jay-Z ft. Beyoncé's song "Family Feud." In 2010 DuVernay founded the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), her own company distributing films made by or focusing on black people. DuVernay also owns Forward Movement, a film and television production company.
In the summer of 2011, the second narrative feature film, Middle of Nowhere, had its world premiere on January 20 at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Here she became the first African-American woman to win the U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic prize. Commissioned by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, Ava created a film about African-American history. Her August: A Day in the Life of a People explores six significant Black Culture events that happened on the same date, August 28. What a resume!!! And this was just the beginning!!
“Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.”
“Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you’re focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don’t have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited. My way was to work, make my short... make my documentary... make my small films... use my own money... raise money myself... and stay shooting and focused on each project.”
How It’s Going: Queen DuVernay is a force with no sigh of weakening any time soon! 2016 brought us the famous Netflix documentary 13th. This film received the honor of being the first documentary to open the New York Film Festival!! In 2017, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Oscars, and it won a Peabody Award in 2017 and a Columbia Journalism School DuPont Award.
Have you heard of A Wrinkle in Time? Well You have Ms. Ava DuVernay to thank for that!! This was be her most successful film at the box office. Ava is the first #BlackQueen to direct a live-action movie with a budget of over $100 million, and the second woman to do so after Patty Jenkins (who directed Wonder Woman). ESPN commissioned DuVernay to produce and direct Venus Vs., a documentary on Venus Williams's fight for equal prize money in 2015. That same year, DuVernay announced she would be creating and producing the drama series Queen Sugar, based on Natalie Baszile's novel. Queen Sugar premiered on Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) to critical acclaim and positive reviews! #DoItQueen
When They See Us, they KNOW we came with a PURPOSE!!! But, I digress, When They See Us, you know, the series on Netflix, YEP that one!! It was created by DuVernay, who served as executive producer, co-writer, and director. The series premiered on Netflix on May 31, 2019. On June 25, 2019, Netflix announced that it had streamed by over 23 million viewers within its first month of release!!!! #TrailBlazer. It has received a record number of 16 nominations for Emmy Awards to write, direct, and act for stars and supporting actors. #BlackGirlsStayMagical
In her young career, she has won a myriad of awards and honors, and she continues to give back to the community while helping to elevate others' careers. In February 2018, DuVernay, producer Dan Lin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti 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. In 2017, DuVernay was listed on the annual Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. As part of the director's branch, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Board of governors elected Ava In 2020. Michael T. Martin speaks of DuVernay's mission and calls to action, "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."
She is HerSTory in the making. Let me get two snaps and clap cause Ava DuVernay is telling our stories Her Way… A.K.A The Right Way. Ya see what I did there!! lol!
“As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.”
“There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It’s a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.”
Where to Find More: There is no denying her power, her force, her drive, and her determination!! If you want to learn more about this Queen click here!
Thank you for your talent, thank you for your inspiration, thank you for your dream, and thank you for giving others the belief in themselves that they can too! You are a true gem Ms. Ava DuVernay!
As always, thank you ALL for allowing me to share my passions with you and I hope that my blog inspires you to go after what you want and believe in yourself in every aspect, because I believe in you! Now strike your POWER POSE 🕺💃- We got this, NOW LET’S GET TO IT!!!
Keep Shining Loves
-💕 Jazz
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