1. Ayoka "Ayo" Chenzira was born on November 8,1953 and is an independent African-American producer, film director, television director, animator, writer, experimental filmmaker, and transmedia storyteller.
27 Facts About Ayoka Chenzira
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Ayoka Chenzira is the first African American woman animator and one of a handful of Black experimental filmmakers working since the late 1970s.
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Ayoka Chenzira has earned international acclaim for her experimental, documentary, animation, and cross-genre filmmaking productions.
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Ayoka Chenzira grew up playing the piano, cello, field hockey and studying ballet.
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Ayoka Chenzira was exposed to art from a young age, including dance lessons, opera and theatre visits as a child.
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Ayoka Chenzira's mother made reimagined designer clothing for Ayoka, and strongly encouraged her to pursue her artistic ambitions.
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Ayoka Chenzira has been working with moving images since she was 17.
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Ayoka Chenzira is the first African American to have earned her PhD in Digital Media Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Ayoka Chenzira is the Division Chair of the Arts at Spelman College and one of the first African Americans to teach film production in higher education.
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Ayoka Chenzira was one of a group of young Black filmmakers who worked outside of mainstream financing and production systems for films.
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From 1981 to 1984, Ayoka Chenzira was the programs director of the Black Filmmakers Foundation, where she helped promote and distribute black films.
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Ayoka Chenzira was one of the first African-American women to produce a feature-length film, Alma's Rainbow.
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Ayoka Chenzira has a successful production division as well as a distribution division, Black Indie Classics.
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Ayoka Chenzira was an arts administrator and lobbyist for independent cinema.
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Ayoka Chenzira was a founding board member of Production Partners in New York, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the visibility of African-American as well as Hispanic and Latino American films.
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Ayoka Chenzira was key in providing support for Charles Lane's award-winning feature Sidewalk Stories.
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Ayoka Chenzira has served as a media panelist for the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
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Ayoka Chenzira taught screenwriting and directing in Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.
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In 2001, Ayoka Chenzira was invited to serve as the first William and Camille Cosby Endowed Professor in the Arts at Spelman College in Atlanta.
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Ayoka Chenzira created and served as director of Oral Narratives and Digital Technology, a joint venture between Spelman College and the Durham Institute of Technology where she designed and taught documentary filmmaking primarily for Zulu students at DIT.
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Ayoka Chenzira depicts the salon locale as an engaging space, calling for an initiation in scholarly and film discourse about Black hair culture and Black female agency.
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Ayoka Chenzira produced and directed Alma's Rainbow in 1993, a "coming-of-age" comedy-drama about middle-class black women in Brooklyn.
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Ayoka Chenzira said the film grew out of a sense that Black Americans felt discomfort at the idea of dancing well.
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Ayoka Chenzira released the first part of HERadventure, an "interactive sci-fi fantasy film" on her website and YouTube.
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In 2018, Ayoka Chenzira received a call from Ava DuVernay inviting her to direct an episode in season 3 of Queen Sugar.
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In 2018, Ayoka Chenzira was nominated for an NAACP Award for her directing work on the television series, Queen Sugar.
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Ayoka Chenzira won the 1991 Sony Innovator Award, and has been honored for her contributions to Black cinema by the mayors of New York City and Detroit.