Event Calendar

Ava DuVernay, 2012 Sundance Best Director: Dramatic winner, will speak at the University of Maryland, Thursday, September 20, 2012. DuVernay is the first African American woman to win the Sundance directing award. The film for which she won, Middle of Nowhere, will open in D.C. in October.
 
At UMD DuVernay will show clips from one documentary, My Mic Sounds Nice, and two feature films, I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere, and discuss her documentary and narrative styles.  DuVernay is also the founder of AaFFRM, the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement, an innovative marketing strategy designed to empower black independent filmmakers by increasing the theatrical distribution of their works.
  
Sponsored by Department of Women’s Studies, Department of African American Studies, and the African American Political Culture Workshop of the Department of History
 
For questions, please contact: Elsa Barkley Brown (barkleyb@umd.edu)
 
Ava DuVernay made her directorial debut with the critically-acclaimed 2008 hip hop documentary, This is The Life. Winner of Audience Awards in Toronto, Los Angeles and Seattle, the film was released theatrically and debuted on Showtime in April 2009. “It’s rare that being schooled so deeply is so pleasurable.” (LA Weekly)  Her 2010 My Mic Sounds Nice, a definitive history of female hip hop artists, was BET Networks’ first original music documentary.  In 2010, she wrote, produced and directed the feature, I Will Follow, starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Omari Hardwick and Beverly Todd.  Released theatrically in 2011, the family drama was hailed by critic Roger Ebert as "one of the best films I've seen about the loss of a loved one." “Its elegantly simple structure filled in with startling, understated force . . .” (Village Voice)  In 2012 she won the U.S. Best Director: Dramatic Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, which chronicles one woman’s struggle to maintain her life when her husband is sentenced to prison. “Classic filmmaking of a completely different sort” (LA Times)  More information at http://www.avaduvernay.com