Ava DuVernay

Early life and education

Ava Marie DuVernay was born on August 24, 1972, in Long Beach, California. She was raised by her mother, Darlene (née Sexton), an educator, and her stepfather, Murray Maye. The surname of her biological father, Joseph Marcel DuVernay III, originates with Louisiana Creole ancestry. She grew up in Lynwood, California. She has four siblings.

During her summer vacations, she would travel to the childhood home of her stepfather, which was not far from Selma, Alabama. DuVernay said that these summers influenced the making of Selma, as her father had witnessed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Raised Catholic, 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. DuVernay is an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

In 2021, DuVernay was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University.

Career

1991–2008: Early work

DuVernay reportedly did not pick up a camera until she was 32. DuVernay's first interest was journalism, a choice influenced by an internship with CBS News. She was assigned to help cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial. DuVernay became disillusioned with journalism, however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies. She opened 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, a promotional network that began in 2003 and had more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops in 16 U.S. cities, expanded to 20 in 2008. They 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, and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.

In 2005, over the Christmas holiday, DuVernay decided to take $6,000 and make her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life. Based on her mother's experiences, the 12-minute film was about an uplifting trip by a struggling single mother (Melissa De Sousa) and her three kids to a local Los Angeles discount grocery store. The film toured the festival circuit and was broadcast on February 6, 2007, as part of Showtime's Black Filmmaker Showcase.

DuVernay next explored making documentaries, because they can be done on a smaller budget than fiction films, and she could learn the trade while doing so. In 2007, she directed the short Compton in C Minor, for which she "challenged herself to capture Compton in only two hours and present whatever she found." The following year, 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 participated as part of the duo Figures of Speech. This is the Life won audience awards at the ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, the Hollywood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle.

2010–2013: Film debut and breakthrough

In 2010, DuVernay directed three TV documentaries. The first, two-hour concert film TV One Night Only: Live from the Essence Music Festival, was a mix of live performances and behind-the-scenes vignettes. It aired August 28, 2010, on TV One and showcases the U.S.'s largest annual African-American entertainment gathering, the Essence Music Festival. In 2010 it was held July 2–4 in New Orleans. Two days later, BET premiered its first original music documentary, My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women and Hip Hop, a 41-minute long history of female hip hop artists. On Thanksgiving 2010, TV One showed DuVernay's 44-minute documentary special Essence Presents: Faith Through the Storm, about two Black sisters who reclaimed their lives after personal devastation during Hurricane Katrina. "It was done for a client, for Essence. They wanted to talk about how faith helped them through, that was very important to them. So it is interspersed with gospel music, images of Katrina, their home and family."

I Will Follow

In 2011, DuVernay's first narrative feature film, I Will Follow, a drama starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield, was released theatrically. DuVernay's aunt Denise Sexton was the inspiration for the film. In an interview, DuVernay talked about how her real life experiences differed from the film: "I was a caregiver 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 than the character in the film who wants to fight in a different way." The film cost DuVernay $50,000 and was made in 14 days. Roger Ebert called it "one of the best films I've seen about coming to terms with the death of a loved one." I Will Follow was an official selection of AFI Fest, Pan-African Film Festival, Urbanworld and Chicago International Film Festival.

It wasn't until after I Will Follow that DuVernay fully left her job in publicity. DuVernay stated: "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."

Middle of Nowhere

In the summer of 2011, DuVernay began production on her second narrative feature film, Middle of Nowhere, from a script she had written in 2003 but was unable to finance. The film drew from her own experiences growing up in Compton and Inglewood. The story focuses on the wife of an incarcerated man who is serving a 10-year sentence. She drops out of medical school in order to have more time and emotional energy to give to her incarcerated spouse. The film explores how the families of the incarcerated are also victims of the system and shows how commonly this burden of incarceration falls upon women of color. In an interview with the LA Times, DuVernay touched on her inspiration for the film, "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."

2016–present: Career expansion

13th

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 story of Kalief Browder.

It was released on October 7, 2016, on Netflix. 13th garnered acclaim from film critics and has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 94 reviews. The critical consensus says: "13th strikes at the heart of America's tangled racial history, offering observations as incendiary as they are calmly controlled." In a review from Awards Circuit, Angela Davis said "13th is probably the most important movie you'll ever see." In 2017, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Oscars; DuVernay became the first Black woman to be nominated by the academy as a director in a feature category. The film also won a Peabody Award in 2017 and a Columbia Journalism School duPont Award in 2018. Her music video for the Jay-Z ft. Beyoncé song "Family Feud" premiered December 29, 2017, on Tidal.

A Wrinkle in Time

In 2010, it was announced that Disney carried the film rights to Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time which follows a young girl traveling through space and time. 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. Granat had previously worked with Disney on the Chronicles of Narnia and Bridge to Terabithia films. On August 5, 2014, Jennifer Lee was announced as the screenwriter, taking over from Stockwell, who had written the first draft. On February 8, 2016, it was reported that DuVernay had been offered a chance to direct the film, and she was confirmed as director later that same month.

Production company

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, 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.

Podcast, public speaking, and advocacy

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. DuVernay talked about her goals with The Call-In: "For people of color and women filmmakers, so often the questions we get asked are about being a woman or a person of color. So The Call-In was a space where we could just talk about craft."

On October 27, 2013, DuVernay gave one of the Executive Keynote addresses for Film Independent, a non-profit organization that produces the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, at their 2013 Film Independent Form, a three-day event. She was one of two keynote speakers along with the chief executive officer of Netflix, Ted Sarandos.

DuVernay, in a keynote address at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, shared that she was the seventh person asked to direct Selma and described her experience at the 2015 Oscars, while being an honor to attend, was just "a room in L.A."

In February 2018 it was announced that DuVernay, along with producer Dan Lin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, had 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.

Since May 2019, DuVernay has co-hosted The Essentials, a weekly film series on Turner Classic Movies, with Ben Mankiewicz. DuVernay has appeared in wrap-arounds each Saturday night on the channel, discussing a wide range of films, including Marty, Ashes and Embers, Harlan County, USA and La Pointe Courte.

At the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony, she wore a red Artists4Ceasefire badge calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire during the Gaza war. In September 2025, she signed an open pledge with Film Workers for Palestine pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions "that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people."

In 2025, DuVernay was president of the Jury at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico.

Filmography

Film

Executive producer

The White Tiger (2021)

Short films

Television

Documentary series

Awards, nominations, honors

In 2012, Variety featured DuVernay in its Women's Impact Report.

In June 2013, she was invited to both the director's and writer's branches of AMPAS. DuVernay was only the second Black woman, following Kasi Lemmons, to be invited to the director's branch.

DuVernay became the inaugural recipient of the Tribeca Film Institute's Heineken Affinity Award, receiving a $20,000 prize and industry support for future projects. DuVernay donated all the money to AFFRM, the Black arthouse film collective she founded.

In June 2015, DuVernay was honored as part of Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards with the Dorothy Arzner Directors Award.

In April 2015, DuVernay was chosen as one of Mattel's "Sheros" of 2015. A custom-made one-of-a-kind Barbie in DuVernay's likeness was produced. The doll was auctioned off with the proceeds given to charity. Due to high demand, a collectible version of the doll was produced and sold in December of that year.

In 2016, DuVernay was named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders

In 2017, DuVernay became the first Black woman nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, for her film 13th.

In 2017, DuVernay was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award for Visual Arts.

In 2018, DuVernay won Entertainer of the Year at the 49th NAACP Image Awards for her work in 2017.

PETA declared DuVernay and actor Benedict Cumberbatch to be the Most Beautiful Vegan Celebs of 2018.