Ava DuVernay

Ava DuVernay (born August 24, 1972, Long Beach, California, U.S.) is an American director, producer, and writer whose film and television projects explore the African American experience. Among her best-known works are the film Selma (2014), the documentary 13th (2016), and the miniseries When They See Us (2019). DuVernay was the first African American woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe for best director and the first African American woman to direct a film that was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.

Born in Long Beach, California, DuVernay was raised in the nearby communities of Lynwood and Compton by her mother and stepfather, Darlene and Murray Maye. Her mother worked in jobs such as bank teller, human resources manager, and preschool manager. Her stepfather originally came from Alabama, where as a boy he witnessed the Selma March for African American civil rights in 1965. Growing up, DuVernay spent summers visiting her stepfather’s family in Alabama. She also developed a love for the arts, which was nurtured by her aunt Denise Amanda Sexton. After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school, DuVernay attended the University of California at Los Angeles, earning bachelor’s degrees in English and African American studies in 1995. After working for a few years in film publicity, she started her own company to market movies.

In 2008 DuVernay transitioned to writing, directing, and producing films. She first gained critical attention with the documentary This Is the Life (2008), about the alternative hip-hop movement in Los Angeles in the 1990s. A former performer in the same scene captured in the documentary, DuVernay drew praise for her portrait of a tight-knit subculture that developed alongside the more predominant gangsta rap movement in the city. In 2010 DuVernay founded the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (now Array), which promotes women and people of color in the film industry. The company distributed DuVernay’s first feature film, I Will Follow (2010), a drama exploring a woman’s grief after the death of a relative. The film was inspired by her aunt, who died from breast cancer in 2003. Middle of Nowhere (2012) shows the daily life of a young woman whose husband is in jail. With that movie DuVernay became the first African American woman to win the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film that brought DuVernay to the attention of a broader audience was the 2014 historical drama Selma. It chronicles the 1965 civil rights march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., that resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Selma was critically acclaimed, and DuVernay became the first African American woman to receive a Golden Globe nomination for best director. In addition, the movie was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. The film also had personal meaning for DuVernay because of her stepfather’s memories of the march and her own experiences visiting Alabama as a child. In 2016 DuVernay released the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, an exploration of the American prison system and its racial inequities. It was also nominated for nine Emmy Awards, winning four awards, including those for outstanding documentary and outstanding writing for nonfiction programming. She returned to feature films as director of the adventure fantasy A Wrinkle in Time (2018). It was based on the award-winning 1962 book of the same name by Madeleine L’Engle and featured a multicultural cast that included Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling.

DuVernay has also worked on various television projects. In 2019 she created and directed the miniseries When They See Us. Based on actual events, it follows five Black teenagers who were wrongly convicted for a violent crime in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. The miniseries received 16 Emmy nominations in the limited series category, including for outstanding series, writing, and directing. It won for casting and for lead actor (Jharrel Jerome). DuVernay also created the TV series Queen Sugar (2016–22). The drama, set in Louisiana, delves into the lives of three siblings. In addition, she cocreated and cowrote Naomi (2022), a series about an African American teenage superhero. In 2023 she returned to directing feature films with Origin, a dramatization of journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s personal and professional experiences as she researched and wrote her best-selling book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (2020). DuVernay also wrote the film’s script.