Ava Marie DuVernay is an American filmmaker and former film publicist who was born on August 24, 1972. In addition to being a nominee for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe, she has won the Primetime Emmy Award, the NAACP Image Award, the BAFTA Film Award, and the BAFTA TV Award.
After directing her first film, I Will Follow (2010), DuVernay went on to win the directing prize for the U.S. dramatic competition with her second feature, Middle of Nowhere, making history as the first black woman to do so.
DuVernay made history by becoming the first African-American woman to be nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for her work on the Martin Luther King Jr. film Selma (2014). A Wrinkle in Time (2018), a Disney fantasy film, made her the first African-American woman to direct a movie with a $100 million budget, and the Netflix documentary 13th (2016), which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Her television credits include the OWN drama series Queen Sugar (2016) and two Netflix drama limited series: Colin in Black & White (2021), which is based on the adolescent years of NFL star Colin Kaepernick, and When They See Us (2019), which is based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case.
DuVernay was listed as one of the most influential persons in the world in 2017 on the Time 100 list. She was chosen to serve on the directors branch of the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Early Life and Education
In Long Beach, California, Ava Marie DuVernay was born on August 24, 1972. Murray Maye, her stepfather, and her mother Darlene (née Sexton), a teacher, raised her. Her biological father, Joseph Marcel DuVernay III, has Louisiana Creole background, which is reflected in his last name. In Lynwood, California, she was raised. She is one of four siblings.
She would go to her stepfather's childhood home, which wasn't too far from Selma, Alabama, during her summer breaks. Due to the fact that her father had witnessed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, DuVernay claimed that these summers had an impact on the creation of Selma.
DuVernay received his diploma from Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood in 1990. She pursued a dual BA at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in English literature and African-American studies. The sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha welcomes Ava as an honorary member.
Career
Despite her success in the film and television sectors, DuVernay didn't start using a camera until she was 32 years old. An internship with CBS News had a big impact on DuVernay's decision to pursue journalism as her first passion. She was tasked with assisting with the O.J. Trial for Simpson's murder. However, DuVernay lost interest in journalism and made the decision to enter the field of public relations. She began by working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR firms. In 1999, she established The DuVernay Agency, often known as DVAPR, as her own public relations business.
She worked on marketing campaigns for films and television programmes such Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls through her company, DVAPR, which offers marketing and PR services to the entertainment and leisure industries.
Among DuVernay's other projects is the Urban Beauty Collective, a marketing network that debuted in 2003 and by 2008 had grown to include 20 U.S. cities and more than 10,000 African-American beauty and barbershops. They received free mailers from Urban Eye, a daily two-minute celebrity and entertainment news show distributed to radio stations, HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of colour, and UBC-TV, a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion programme.
Film
Over the Christmas break in 2005, DuVernay made the decision to spend $6,000 on her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life. The 12-minute movie, which was based on her mother's experiences, told the inspiring story of a struggling single mother (Melissa De Sousa) taking her three children to a nearby budget grocery store in Los Angeles. The movie made its way around the festival circuit before being aired on February 6, 2007, as a part of Showtime's Black Filmmaker Showcase.
The second thing DuVernay looked into was producing documentaries because they could be made on a cheaper budget than fiction films and she could pick up skills in the process. In 2007, 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 took part as a member of the duo Figures of Speech. For the short Compton in C Minor, she "challenged herself to capture Compton in only two hours and present whatever she found." This is the Life garnered audience prizes at the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle, the Hollywood Black Film Festival, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, and the ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto.
I'll Comply
Article focus: I Will Follow (the movie).
I Will Follow, a 2011 drama starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield and directed by Ava DuVernay, was released in theatres. The movie was inspired by DuVernay's aunt Denise Sexton. In a recent interview, DuVernay discussed how her real-life experiences differed from the storyline: "I was a carer for my aunt, Denise Sexton, in the last year and a half of her life. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She was a fighter and was active in her treatment to the end, which was different from the character in the film who wants to fight in a I Will Follow was an official selection of AFI Fest, Pan-African Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Chicago International Film Festival. Roger Ebert praised it as "one of the best films I've seen about coming to terms with the death of a loved one."
DuVernay didn't completely quit her career in public relations until after I Will Follow. DuVernay said: "I knew that as a Black woman in this industry, I wouldn't have people knocking down my door to give me money for my projects, so I was happy to make them on the side while working my day job."
Nowhere in Particular
Middle of Nowhere, a 2012 motion picture
Middle of Nowhere, which DuVernay is directing, is her second narrative feature film. The script for the movie was written by DuVernay in 2003 but she was unable to secure funding for it. She drew inspiration for the movie from her own upbringing in Compton and Inglewood. The wife of an inmate who is serving a 10-year sentence is the subject of the narrative. In order to devote more time and emotional energy to her incarcerated spouse, she withdraws from medical school. The movie exposes how frequently this burden of incarceration falls on women of colour and examines how the relatives of the prisoners are also victims of the system. According to DuVernay, who discussed the film's motivation in an interview with the LA Times, "The idea of looking at the victims of incarceration - the mothers, sisters, and daughters -- really came out of knowing women who were going through it."
At the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it competed in the American dramatic competition, the movie had its world premiere on January 20. It won over the US. Dramatic for DuVernay in the director's prize. She received the award for the first time as an African-American woman. For her contribution on the movie, DuVernay also received the 2012 Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian commissioned DuVernay to make a movie about African-American history. Six historical occurrences that took place on August 28 in various years are examined in her book August 28: A Day in the Life of a People. It made its premiere on September 24, 2016, at the opening of the museum. Lupita Nyong'o, Don Cheadle, Regina King, David Oyelowo, Angela Bassett, Michael Ealy, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, André Holland, and Glynn Turman are among the cast members of the 22-minute movie. William IV's royal assent to the UK Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, the 1955 Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till, age 14, the release of "Please Mr. Postman" by The Marvellettes, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 I Have a Dream speech, Hurricane Katrina's landfall in 2005, and the night Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president at the 2008 Democratic National Convention are among the events depicted.
DuVernay's mission and "call to action" is to "further and foster the Black cinematic image in an organised and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining," according to Michael T. Martin, who also describes her as being 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."
The DuVernay test is the racial equivalent of the Bechdel test (for women in movies), as first proposed by The Guardian writers Nadia and Leila Latif and then by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in January 2016 asking whether "blacks and other minorities have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories."
Selma
Main text: Selma (the movie)
Selma, a dramatic movie with a $20 million budget, directed by Ava DuVernay, is about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, which was led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson. On December 25, 2014, Plan B Entertainment released the critically acclaimed film. Selma will be a historical milestone in the history of biopics because, according to DuVernay, it will be "the first major feature film in theatres that has anything to do with King's essential character" in an interview at Indiana University.
To make King and the residents of Selma the main characters, she uncreditedly rewrote the majority of the original screenplay by Paul Webb. The biggest mistake of her career, according to DuVernay, was letting Paul Webb "take credit for writing Selma when I wrote it." In response to criticism from some historians and media sources who accused her of irresponsibly rewriting history to portray her own agenda, DuVernay said that the movie is "not a documentary. I don't study history. As a storyteller, I am.
This film was the only one directed by a person of colour that was nominated for the 87th Academy Awards. The award for Best Original Song went to "Glory" from Selma. The film was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Song, but not Best Director, at the 2014 Academy Awards. DuVernay said that she had not expected to be nominated as director, so the omiss was not surprising.
DuVernay declined the opportunity to direct Black Panther, Marvel's first movie about a superhero of colour, after Selma, saying in an interview with Essence, "I think I'll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be. Marvel operates in a particular manner that I find to be amazing, and many people adore what they do. She also stated her support for the project continuing forward, saying, "I love the character of Black Panther, the nation of Wakanda, and all that that could be visually. I loved that they reached out to me." I'll be the first in queue to see it and wish them luck.
13th
The thirteenth (movie)
In July 2016, the New York Film Festival made the surprise announcement that 13th, a documentary directed by DuVernay, would open the festival. Until the announcement no mention of the film had been made by either DuVernay or Netflix, the film's distributor. Centered on race in the United States criminal justice system, the film is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery (except as punishment for a crime). DuVernay's documentary opens with the statement that 25 percent of the people in the world who are incarcerated are incarcerated in the U.S., and argues that slavery has been effectively perpetuated in the U.S. through disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color. The film features several prominent activists, politicians, and public figures, such as Bryan Stevenson, Angela Davis, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michelle Alexander, and others, who discuss such issues as convict leasing, the war on drugs, and disproportionate arrests, convictions and sentencing of minorities. It was also the first critically acclaimed documentary to highlight the tragic story of Kalief Browder.
13th was released on Netflix on October 7, 2016, and received positive reviews from critics. It has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 94 reviews, and the consensus among them is that it "strikes at the heart of America's tangled racial history," offering observations that are both explosive and restrained. In an interview with Awards Circuit, Angela Davis said that "13th is probably the most important movie you'll ever see."
The Time Warp
A Wrinkle in Time, a 2018 motion picture
Following the success of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Disney announced the hiring of Jeff Stockwell to write the screenplay for Cary Granat and his new Bedrock Studios. Cary Granat had previously worked with Disney on the Chronicles of Narnia and Bridge to Terabithia films. In 2010, it was announced that Disney carried the film rights to Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time.
Filming for A Wrinkle in Time began in November 2016. DuVernay is the second woman, after Patty Jenkins (who directed Wonder Woman), to have directed a live-action movie with a budget of over $100 million.
Despite Disney's Q2 earnings report in May 2018, Yahoo! Finance predicted the movie would cost the studio between $86 and 186 million. A Wrinkle in Time still made the list of the top 100 grossing movies of 2018, making Ava DuVernay one of four female directors to do so. The movie was released in March 2018 and earned $33 million in its opening weekend, placing second at the box office behind Black Panther.
The movie received mixed reviews once it came out, with some "taking issue with the film's heavy use of CGI and numerous plot holes" and others "celebrating its message of female empowerment and diversity."
Television
The first, two-hour concert film TV One Night Only: Live from the Essence Music Festival, which aired on August 28, 2010, on TV One, featured live performances and behind-the-scenes vignettes and showcased the U.S.'s largest annual African-American entertainment gathering, the Essence Music Festival, which in 2010 was held July 2-4 in New Orleans. Two days later, BET premiered its first original music documentary, My Mic Soun, which was directed by DuVernay.
DuVernay's 44-minute documentary special Essence Presents: Faith Through the Storm, about two Black sisters who recovered their lives after experiencing personal catastrophe during Hurricane Katrina, aired on TV One on Thanksgiving 2010 and was produced for a client, Essence. Because it was so important to them, they wanted to discuss how their faith had gotten them through. Gospel music, pictures of Katrina, their house, and family are so interspersed.
For their film series Nine for IX, which debuted on July 2, 2013, ESPN commissioned DuVernay to create and direct Venus Vs., a documentary on Venus Williams's quest for equal prize money.
As the broadcast premiere of the performance-and-interview series HelloBeautiful Interludes Live, DuVernay also directed the John Legend episode, which aired on TV One on September 14, 2013.
Additionally, she was the director of Scandal's eighth episode of the third season, "Vermont is for Lovers, Too," which had its television premiere on ABC on November 21, 2013.
The CBS civil rights crime drama pilot For Justice, starring Anika Noni Rose, was executive produced and directed by DuVernay in 2015; however, it was not picked up for distribution.
The drama series Queen Sugar, based on the book by Natalie Baszile, was announced by DuVernay to be created and executive produced in the same year.
On August 1, 2016, the series was renewed for a second season ahead of its television debut; it aired in a two-night premiere on June 20 and 21, 2017. The series was renewed for a third season on July 26, 2017. In August 2018, OWN renewed the series for a fourth season, which premiered on June 12, 2019. Queen Sugar made its television debut on September 6, 2016, on the Oprah Winfrey Network to positive reviews. DuVernay wrote four episodes and directed two.
When They See Us was created by Ava DuVernay, who also served as executive producer, co-writer, and director. Other executive producers credited include Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Rosenthal, and Berry Welsh. Production companies involved with the series included Participant Media, Harpo Films, and Tribeca Productions. On July 6, 2017, it was announced that Netflix had given the production When They See Us a series order consisting of four episodes.
It garnered a record-breaking 16 nominations for Emmy Awards for writing, directing, and acting for leads and supporting performers. On June 25, 2019, Netflix stated that the miniseries had been streamed by over 23 million viewers within its first month of release.
Music videos and Advertisements
In 2013, DuVernay collaborated with Miu Miu as part of their Women's Tales film series. Her short film The Door, which debuted online in February 2013 and was shown at the Venice Days sidebar of the 70th Venice International Film Festival in August, starred actress Gabrielle Union and brought DuVernay and her Middle of Nowhere co-star Emayatzy Corinealdi back together.
The second branded short film, Say Yes, which was sponsored by the cosmetic company Fashion Fair and stars Kali Hawk, Lance Gross, Julie Dash, Victoria Mahoney, Lorraine Toussaint, and Issa Rae, was also published by DuVernay in August 2013 via Vimeo.
Chapter 1, which debuted on September 20, 2015 during Fox's Emmy broadcast, was the first of three commercials directed by DuVernay for Apple Music and their advertising agency Translation in 2015.Chapters 2 and 3 followed in November 2015 and February 2016, respectively.
On December 29, 2017, her music video for the Jay-Z and Beyoncé song "Family Feud" debuted on Tidal.
Distribution and Creation of Films
The main text is ARRAY
DuVernay founded African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM) in 2010 to release films made by or starring Black people. DuVernay describes AFFRM as "not so much a business, but a call to action."
Additionally, DuVernay owns the film and television production company Forward Movement.
Future Initiatives
She revealed in 2013 that she was working on a Compton-set narrative feature film with the working title Part of the Sky.
David Oyelowo was reportedly involved in the project when it was revealed that Ava DuVernay would be writing, producing, and directing a fictitious account that will focus on the "social and environmental" aspects of Hurricane Katrina while also featuring a love tale and a murder mystery.
On May 29, 2019, DuVernay revealed that she and Tom King will co-write the picture; by April 2021, the film was no longer moving forward. In 2018, it was announced that DuVernay would be directing a New Gods film for the DC Extended Universe.
On October 29, 2018, it was revealed that DuVernay would collaborate with the Prince estate to helm a Netflix biopic on his life; however, in August 2019, DuVernay resigned from the position owing to "creative differences."
Colin in Black & White, a six-episode series developed by Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick and set to premiere on Netflix in 2020, will focus on Kaepernick's youth and the different incidents that shaped him into the activist he is today.
On February 11, 2020, rumours circulated that Ava DuVernay might co-produce and film a Netflix documentary about Nipsey Hussle.
Her following movie, Caste, a Netflix original movie based on the book by Isabel Wilkerson, will be released in October 2020.
Other Tasks
The Call-In is a podcast series that DuVernay started in September 2013 with AFFRM. DuVernay explains her goals with The Call-In: "For people of colour and women filmmakers, so often the questions we get asked are about being a woman or a person of colour. Therefore, The Call-In served as a forum for us to simply discuss craft.
On October 27, 2013, DuVernay delivered one of the executive keynote addresses for Film Independent, a non-profit organisation that organises the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Film Independent Spirit Awards. She was one of two keynote speakers alongside Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, at the three-day 2013 Film Independent Form.
In a keynote speech at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, DuVernay revealed that she was the seventh person to be asked to direct Selma and that, despite being an honour to attend, the 2015 Oscars were just "a room in L.A." for her.
The Evolve Entertainment Fund, founded by DuVernay, producer Dan Lin, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, aims to foster inclusion and give members of underserved communities the chance to pursue their aspirations in the entertainment industry.
DuVernay has appeared in wraparounds on Turner Classic Movies each Saturday night, discussing a variety of movies, including Marty, Ashes and Embers, Harlan County, USA, and La Pointe Courte. Since May 2019, DuVernay has cohosted The Essentials, a weekly film series on the network with Ben Mankiewicz.
Design and Themes
DuVernay is interested in two main topics: first, the complexities of the Black American family, especially "Black women's agency and subjectivity" within the family and within a racist, patriarchal society; and second, the injustices that have affected and continue to affect Black families and communities throughout history.
For instance, Selma, a movie about Martin Luther King Jr. and a historical march, makes a big effort to centre and explore the significant female activists who participated in the event: "Each woman is shown within the film to propel the Selma campaign."
One of the social issues that DuVernay repeatedly returns to in her work is mass incarceration and the effects of incarceration on African American communities. This is the main topic of her Netflix documentary, 13th, which finds the roots of mass incarceration in the legal end of slavery. The film moves chronologically through history, keeping "a running total of the rapidly rising incarceration numbers since the 1970s; it works to contextualize these rising digits with a grand narrative that weaves together the racist, political, and financial motivations that paved the nation's way to mass incarceration." DuVernay's television work addresses this as well: When They See Us depicts the ways in which the U.S. justice system targets Black people and other people of color, and in her show Queen Sugar one of the primary characters "is a convicted felon whose prison past makes it difficult for him to find a job and puts an ongoing strain on his relationship with his family." This is an issue that DuVernay returns to again and again in her work.
Middle of Nowhere, which centres on a Black woman and shows how incarceration affects her life and the lives of her family, encapsulates both of DuVernay's interests. This fictional story highlights the ways in which incarceration infiltrates even those who are not in prison through close association with someone who is incarcerated.
The cinematography and staging of the film emphasizes the protagonist, Ruby's, own entrapment via association to incarceration. Ruby puts her life on hold to provide emotional, legal, and financial support for her incarcerated husband, Derek. In Marquita Smith's analysis of the film, she explains that "carceral logic dictates that those who desire to maintain contact with incarcerated spouses...must endure an often invisible form of punishment...which criminalizes caring for the incarcerated." When Ruby visits Derek, the camera takes special notice of the ways in which her own freedoms and bodily autonomy are restricted within the prison: "the camera follows the various examination acts, lingering on Ruby's body parts as they are inspected." Lastly, there is a visual parallel drawn between the women who are visiting and the inmates. The women are often shown in lines and shot from behind fences and bars. They are herded into the visitation room in a way that parallels the male prisoners. DuVernay frames Ruby in a larger context of incarceration and its peripheral effects by showing her among a community of women whose situations parallel Ruby's. We see Ruby riding the bus to the prison with many other women, most of whom are Black, waiting in line with these women, and eventually being shuffled into the meeting area with these women. In the scene where Ruby visits Derek on their anniversary after hearing that he is up for parole, the camera pans over many other couples who sit in the visiting room with them- "by panning to show the various families in the visitation room before focusing on the protagonist, the film enables viewers to see beyond Ruby's individual happiness and recognize the importance of intimacy for the collective."
Filmography
Film
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
2010 | I Will Follow | Yes | Yes | Yes |
2012 | Middle of Nowhere | Yes | Yes | Yes |
2014 | Selma | Yes | No | No |
2018 | A Wrinkle in Time | Yes | No | No |
TBA | Caste | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Executive producer
Short films
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
2006 | Saturday Night Life | Yes | Yes | No |
2013 | The Door | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Say Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Documentary films
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes |
2007 | Compton in C Minor | Yes | No | Yes | Short |
2008 | This is the Life | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
2016 | August 28: A Day in the Life of a People | Yes | Yes | Yes | Short |
13th | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Television
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Executive | Creator | Notes |
2013 | Scandal | Yes | No | No | No | Episode "Vermont is for Lovers, Too" |
2015 | For Justice | Yes | No | Yes | No | Unaired TV pilot |
2016–2022 | Queen Sugar | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Writer (4 episodes), Director (2 episodes) |
2019 | When They See Us | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Director (4 episodes) |
The Red Line | No | No | Yes | No | ||
2020–present | Cherish the Day | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
2021 | Colin in Black & White | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Episode "Cornrows" |
Home Sweet Home | No | No | Yes | Yes | ||
2022 | Naomi | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
DMZ | Yes | No | Yes | No | Episode "Good Luck" |
Documentary series
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
2010 | TV One Night Only: Live from the Essence Music Festival | Yes | Yes | No |
My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women and Hip Hop | Yes | No | executive | |
Essence Presents: Faith Through the Storm | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
2013 | Venus Vs. | Yes | Yes | No |
HelloBeautiful Interludes Live: John Legend | Yes | No | No |
Commercials
Year | Title | Notes |
2015–2016 | Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 | Apple Music |
Music video
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
2017 | "Family Feud," Jay-Z ft. Beyoncé | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Awards, nominations, honors
Year | Award | Category | Work | Result |
2011 | African-American Film Critics | Best Screenplay | I Will Follow | Won |
2012 | Black Reel Awards | Best Screenplay | Nominated | |
Best Director | Nominated | |||
NAACP Image Awards | Outstanding Independent Motion Picture | Nominated | ||
Sundance Film Festival | Directing Award | Middle of Nowhere | Won | |
Grand Jury Prize | Nominated | |||
Film Independent Spirit Awards | Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award | Won | ||
Humanitas Prize | Sundance Film | Nominated | ||
African-American Film Critics | Best Independent Film | Won | ||
Best Screenplay | Won | |||
Best Picture | Nominated | |||
Alliance of Women Film Journalists | Best Woman Screenwriter | Nominated | ||
Women Film Critics Circle | Josephine Baker Award | Won | ||
2013 | Black Reel Awards | Best Director | Won | |
Best Screenplay | Won | |||
Best Film | Nominated | |||
Gotham Awards | Best Feature | Nominated | ||
2014 | Online Film Critics Society Award | Best Director | Selma | Nominated |
Black Film Critics Circle | Best Director | Won | ||
Central Ohio Film Critics Association | Best Director | Won | ||
Breakthrough Film Artist | Won | |||
Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Georgia Film Critics Association | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Breakthrough Award | Nominated | |||
Golden Globe Award | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Alliance of Women Film Journalists | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Best Woman Director | Won | |||
Female Icon of the Year | Won | |||
Critics' Choice Movie Awards | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Satellite Awards | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Film Independent Spirit Awards | Best Director | Nominated | ||
African-American Film Critics Association | Best Director | Won | ||
Black Reel Awards | Black Reel Award for Best Director | Won | ||
NAACP Image Award | Outstanding Director | Nominated | ||
Online Film Critics Society | Best Director | Nominated | ||
Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Awards | Best Director | Nominated | ||
2016 | Grammy Awards | Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media | Nominated | |
Alliance of Women Film Journalists | Best Woman Director | 13th | Won | |
Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Film Industry | Won | |||
Black Reel Awards | Best Film | Nominated | ||
Best Feature Documentary | Won | |||
Critics' Choice Documentary Awards | Best Director (TV/Streaming) | Won | ||
Women Film Critics Circle | Best Woman Storyteller (Screenwriting Award) | Won | ||
Courage in Filmmaking | Won | |||
2017 | Academy Award | Best Documentary Feature | Nominated | |
Primetime Emmy Award | Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special | Won | ||
Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming | Nominated | |||
Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming | Won | |||
2018 | BET Awards | Video Director of the Year | "Family Feud" | Won |
2019 | TCA Awards | Program of the Year | When They See Us | Nominated |
Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries and Specials | Nominated | |||
Primetime Emmy Awards | Outstanding Limited Series | Nominated | ||
Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special | Nominated | |||
Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special | Nominated | |||
2020 | Directors Guild of America Award | Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film | Nominated | |
Producers Guild of America Award | Best Limited Series Television | Nominated |
Quick Bio
Nickname | Ava |
Gender | Female |
Age | 50 years old (in 2023) |
Date of Birth | August 24, 1972 |
Full Name | Ava Marie DuVernay |
Profession | Filmmaker and Film distributor |
Nationality | American |
Birthplace | Long Beach, California, United States |
Religion | Not Known |
Zodiac Sign | Virgo |
Qualification | Double BA Major in “English literature” and “African-American” Studies |
School | Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood |
College | University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) |
Profession | Filmmaker and Film distributor |
Net Worth | USD $60 million approx. |
Height, Weight & Physical Stats
Body Measurements | 34-24-36 inches |
Body type | Average |
Height | 5 feet 6 inches (1.67 m) |
Waist | 24 inches |
Hair Color | Black |
Eye Color | Brown |
Family & Relatives
Father | Joseph DuVernay Jr. |
Mother | Darlene Maye |
Brother | None |
Sister | Jina DuVernay |
Marital Status | Single |
No. of Children | None |
Facts
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