31 Facts About Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress.

Cheryl Dunye is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman.

Cheryl Dunye was born in Monrovia, Liberia and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Cheryl Dunye first attended Michigan State University where she was in the political theory program due to her desire to make a change and have an impact on the world.

Cheryl Dunye received her BA from Temple and her MFA from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of Art.

Cheryl Dunye has taught at the UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, Pitzer College, Claremont Graduate University, Pomona College, California Institute of the Arts, The New School of Social Research, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco State University.

Cheryl Dunye describes her crush on Janine that spanned from 9th to 12th grade.

Cheryl Dunye explains that Janine's wealthy middle class lifestyle made Cheryl Dunye feel out of place and uncomfortable with her own identity.

Cheryl Dunye describes her experience working on Janine as an external expression of her personal struggles.

Cheryl Dunye uses the opportunity to explore and discuss the different meanings of such a term in two different contexts between the white and black lesbian communities.

The film opens with Cheryl Dunye narrating in front of a camera about her efforts to get back into the dating scene while attempting to avoid the common pitfall of lesbian serial monogamy.

Later, after Cheryl Dunye has not heard from L for a few days, she attends a party hoping to see L there.

Cheryl Dunye is surprised to find the woman is not L's old roommate, as L had told Cheryl Dunye, but rather her girlfriend.

Frustrated by a lack in the archives, Cheryl Dunye created a fictional character, Fae Richards, and constructed an archive for that character.

Cheryl Dunye decided that she was going to use her work to create a story for black women in early films.

Cheryl Dunye then used the creative archival material to curate events to raise funds and show progress to donors.

Cheryl Dunye conceived of the film while conducting research for a class on black film history.

Cheryl Dunye used fiction and the arts to address these gaps and tell the untold stories of Black women in film.

Cheryl Dunye became interested in exploring motherhood within imprisonment in Stranger Inside by the birth of her daughter and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Additionally, Cheryl Dunye was interested in the topic of incarcerated women through Angela Davis's work and the Critical Resistance's Creating Change conference at University of California, Berkeley.

Cheryl Dunye conducted a screenwriting workshop modeled after Rhodessa Jones's Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women during her research.

The workshop consisted of Cheryl Dunye working with 12 incarcerated women from the Shakopee Correctional Facility in Minnesota; this partnership was commissioned through the Walker Art Center during Cheryl Dunye's time as the center's Artist in Residence.

Cheryl Dunye looked to understand the interpersonal relationships in prison and their use as a means of survival.

Cheryl Dunye directed The Owls, co-written with novelist Sarah Schulman, which made its debut at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Cheryl Dunye has expressed interest in adapting some literary works from Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde.

Cheryl Dunye cites numerous influences that have contributed to her work including that of Chantal Akerman, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Jean-Luc Godard but notes that Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep are some of the "most powerful" influences on her.

Cheryl Dunye's first video, Wild Thing, was an experimental adaptation of the live reading by the black lesbian author and poet Sapphire.

Some other literary figures that Cheryl Dunye recalls include Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Fannie Hurst.

For Stranger Inside, Cheryl Dunye has said that both the adaptations and the novel Imitation of Life played a major part in the mood of the film.

The film was first conceived as a documentary feature, and it employs documentary techniques, but Cheryl Dunye felt that a narrative approach would better suit the subject matter.

In 2018, Cheryl Dunye created her production company, Jingletown Films, named after the neighborhood of Jingletown in Oakland that she once lived in.