Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Film, video, photography
Website: jingletownfilms.com
Cheryl Dunye was born in 1966 in Monrovia, Liberia, and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in 1990 and her MFA from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1992. She lives with her wife and collaborator Karina Hodoyán in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, where the two co-founded Jingletown Films, a production company and platform for diverse and underrepresented storytellers. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She has also taught at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, Pitzer College, Claremont Graduate University, Pomona College, CalArts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and The New School. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in Filmmaking and was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) the same year.
Dunye is best known as the first out Black lesbian to direct a narrative feature-length film: The Watermelon Woman (1996), which won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival and resides in the permanent cinema collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Astraea Foundation, and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award.
Dunye works across film, video, and photography, with a practice rooted in what she has called “fauxmentary” — the blurring of documentary and fiction to create histories that don’t officially exist. In The Watermelon Woman, she invented a fictional Black actress from the 1930s, complete with fabricated archival photographs and interviews, in order to address the real absence of Black lesbian narratives in cinema history. This strategy of using creative archival fabrication to fill historiographic gaps has been central to her work since her earliest short films. Her practice is inseparable from her identity as a Black, lesbian filmmaker of Liberian descent, and she has consistently described herself as making films specifically about and for communities whose stories have been excluded from mainstream representation. She has also directed extensively for television, including Lovecraft Country, Queen Sugar, Dear White People, and Bridgerton.
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