---First black woman to direct a film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Ava Du Vernay
Ava Marie DuVernay (born August 24, 1972,Long Beach, California, U.S.) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor. 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, becoming the first African-American woman to win the award. For her work in 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). Ava Du Vernay

              CAREER

Her first interest was in journalism, a choice influenced by an internship with CBS News, where she was assigned to help cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial. She became disillusioned with journalism however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies before opening her own public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency, also known as DVAPR, in 1999. 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.Other ventures launched by DuVernay include Urban Beauty Collective, which was a promotional network that began in 2003 and had more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops in 16 (20 since 2008) U.S. cities which were mailed a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion program called UBC-TV, 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,as well as HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.

Ava Du Vernay

        Style and themes

Michael T. Martin has said "DuVernay is among the vanguard of a new generation of African American 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."

Ava Du Vernay

Film distribution and production Edit

In 2010 DuVernay began AFFRM (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement), 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 building strong business foundations for films is a priority, DuVernay 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.

Future projects

In 2013, she announced development on a narrative feature film entitled Part of the Sky and set in Compton.

In 2015, it was announced that DuVernay would be writing, producing, and directing a fictional account which will focus on the "social and environmental" aspects of Hurricane Katrina while including a love story and a murder mystery. David Oyelowo was said to be part of the project.

In 2018, it was announced that DuVernay would be directing a New Gods film for the DC Extended Universe.

Other work Edit

In September 2013, DuVernay started a podcast series called The Call-In, a series of phone conversations recorded by AFFRM of Black filmmakers of feature narrative and documentary work.

On March 14, 2015, DuVernay gave a keynote address at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival. In the speech, DuVernay shared that she was the seventh choice of people asked to direct Selma and described her experience at the 2015 Oscars, while being an honor to be able to attend, it was just "a room in L.A."

In February 2018 it was announced DuVernay, along with 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.

Ava Du Vernay