TORONTO, Sept. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- One week after the season three debut of the critically acclaimed OWN drama series Queen Sugar, executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Academy Award nominated director Ava DuVernay announced the final set of directors for the all-female-helmed series. Among the prominent names is pioneering African American female filmmaker and digital media artist Ayoka Chenizra whose contribution to the Queen Sugar canon will mark her directorial debut for primetime television. Chenzira joined an impressive list of season 3 female directors that includes: DeMane Davis, Patricia Cardoso, Shaz Bennett, Maria Govan Lauren Wolkstein, Nijla Mu'min, Christina Choe, and Rachel Raimist, and Queen Sugar's own showrunner Kat Candler. The list made clear that the Queen Sugar team intends to widen its inclusion scope across race, class, and age and keep true to their creative initiative established in the show's first season by series creator Ava DuVernay to hire all female directorial teams.
Ayoka Chenzira is an award-winning independent filmmaker and a recognized pioneer who helped usher in the Black Independent Film movement. Her distinctive body of work spans a variety of styles including: fiction, documentary, animation, performance, experimental narratives, and interactive cinema. Her work reflects a life-long commitment to create stories that compel us to change our world — and to see it with renewed eyes. Like her friend and peer Julie Dash (who is also a Queen Sugar director alumni), Chenzira has continuously challenged Black stereotypes and advanced the belief that African American culture and Black icons are valuable nationwide as well as globally. Her work has meaningfully challenged existing social norms around race and gender and calls audiences to consider a radical reordering of our social, political, economic and cultural relations.
Since the 1970s, Chenzira has been recognized among her peers for creating narratives that address the challenges of racism, xenophobia, sexism and classism. Earlier this year (February 2018), Chenzira celebrated the much anticipated re-release of her iconic two-disc boxed collection of the Black Indie Classics (Volume I), which contains four of Ayoka's early critically acclaimed and award-winning films. Among them are one of the first 35mm features to be written, directed and produced by an African American female filmmaker, Alma's Rainbow (1993), a coming-of-age comedy-drama about a young Black girl growing up in Brooklyn, and satire short Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984), that taps into how identities are mediated, the politics of the natural hair movement, and growing up Black in urban America. Chenzira's earlier work demonstrates her ongoing commitment and exploration of the complexities of historic and contemporaneous conversations about self-image, beauty standards, female agency, and the lived experiences of marginalized women.
Ayoka Chenzira of AYOmentary Productions is a filmmaker, digital media artist and transmedia storyteller who has been producing work since the later 1970's.
To learn more about Ayoka Chenzira, her work, and upcoming contributions to Queen Sugar, visit her website at http://www.ayomentary.com. The series, which has employed 26 female directors to date, airs Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on OWN.
SOURCE AYOmentary Productions
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