Thirty years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust. She became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film.
The Library of Congress placed Daughters of the Dust and her UCLA MFA senior thesis Illusions in the National Film Registry. These two films join a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures by the Librarian of Congress.
Julie Dash, Tina Mabry & Kasi Lemmons join Gina Prince-Bythewood as Directors on ABC Limited Series. ABC’s Women of the Movement has assembled a team of four accomplished Black female directors for the first installment of the potential anthology that celebrates the women of the civil rights movement on the limited series, from creator-writer Marissa Jo Cerar and a producing team that includes Jay-Z, Will Smith and Aaron Kaplan.
In 2021, Julie Dash directed a short film and fashion spread with Chloe x Halle for VOGUE magazine, plus multiple first season episodes of the ABC Special Women of The Movement Executive Produced by Marisa Jo Cerar and Gina Prince-Blythewood. Prior to that she delivered the Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture for the National Gallery of Art. She was a presenter with Angela Davis for the Princeton University Combahee Experiment and the Academy Dialogues with Ava DuVernay and Euzhan Palcy. She was the moderator for Conversations That Matter with Nikole Hannah-Jones, and a panelist for The Directors Guild of America. Dash is the recipient of the Special Award at the 82nd New York Film Critics Circle, the 2017 Women & Hollywood Trailblazer Award, the 2017 New York Women in Film & Television MUSE Award, The Ebert Award, and inducted into the Penn Cultural Center’s 1862 Circle on St. Helena Island.
Dash is known for having directed multiple episodes of the award-winning drama series, Queen Sugar, Season 2, created and produced by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, for OWN Television. She also hosted The Golden Years, a television series for Turner Classic Movies.
Dash was a Filmmaker’s Lab Governor at the Toronto International Film Festival; and screened at the Smithsonian’s First African American Film Festival. She has written and directed for CBS, BET, ENCORE STARZ, SHOWTIME, MTV Movies, HBO, and OWN Television. She directed the NAACP Image Award-winning, Emmy and DGA nominated, The Rosa Parks Story, Incognito, Funny Valentines, Love Song, and Subway Stories: Tales From The Underground. Her work as a film director includes museum and theme park exhibits and design for Disney’s Imagineering, Brothers of the Borderland for The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum, and Smuggling Daydreams into Reality the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her most recent museum installations include Standing at The Scratch Line, at the Philadelphia Museum of African American History, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Shine a Light, a large-scale video mapping projection for the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit.
Dash has several documentary projects in the works, including Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, a feature-length documentary in-progress about Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a world-renowned author, performer, and chef from rural South Carolina.
She earned an MFA in Theater Arts (Film & Television Production) at UCLA, also an MFA in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, and received her BA in Film Production from CCNY.
Julie Dash is a Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.
