Challenging The Status Quo

Director and screenwriter AVA DUVERNAY, 45, rocks. She’s accomplished a slew of firsts in her career and her star just keeps on rising.

- Phila Tyekana

It’s said that everyone has their season to shine, and for indemand American filmmaker Ava DuVernay, her time is now. After running her award-winning film marketing and publicity firm, DuVernay Agency, for 10 years, she switched paths in 2006 and became a director at the age of 32. This, after she was inspired while working as part of the publicity team for the 2004 Jamie Foxx/Tom Cruise thriller, Collateral. Fast-forward to 2017, and it’s clear that the screenwriter/director is making her mark in a Hollywood still dominated by men, most of them white.

Over the past few years, Ava has been doing a stellar job breaking boundaries for women, especially black women, determined to be taken seriously by the film industry. In 2012, she won the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival for Middle of Nowhere, which she wrote and directed. Bigger accolades were to come with her 2014 drama, Selma, about Dr Martin Luther King’s renowned 1965 protests during America’s civil rights struggle. It garnered four Golden Globe nominations and two Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture – making Ava the first African-American female director to receive such recognition. It’s just another in a range of firsts that she’s racked up – although she’s aware of what these breakthroughs mean to many black women.

“It’s not important to me,” she told Rolling Stone at the time. “But I know it’s important to other people. It’s bittersweet, because I’m not the first black woman deserving of it.”