Education

MFA, University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., The City College of New York

Biography

Twenty-six years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) "Daughters of the Dust." With its release, she became the first African-American woman to have a wide theatrical release of a feature film.

In 2004, the Library of Congress placed "Daughters of the Dust" in the National Film Registry where it joins a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures by the Librarian of Congress. Dash is the only African-American woman with a feature film that has been inducted into the National Film Registry.

Dash is the recent recipient of numerous awards including the New York Film Critics Special Award; the 2017 Robert Smalls Merit and Achievement Award; and the Visionary Award from Women in Film, Washington DC. She served as the 2017 Time-Warner Visiting Professor at Howard University, and a Distinguished Professor of Cinema, Television and Emerging Media (CTEMS) at Morehouse College (2015-2017).

Dash recently directed multiple episodes of the award-winning dramatic series, "Queen Sugar," Season 2, created and produced by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey for OWN Television.

She participated in the Trailblazing Women franchise on Turner Classic Movies and later became a visiting host on TCM. Dash, who has written and directed for CBS, BET, ENCORE STARZ, SHOWTIME, MTV Movies and HBO, directed "The Rosa Parks Story," "Incognito," "Funny Valentines," "Love Song," and "Subway Stories: Tales From The Underground." These works have been the recipients of the NAACP Image Award  and nominated for an Emmy and The Directors Guild of America Award.

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, "Smuggling Daydreams Into Reality" for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the upcoming 2017 work, "Standing at The Scratch Line," for the Philadelphia Museum of African American History.

Her work also includes music videos, documentaries, PSA’s, industrial documentary films, and commercial spots for Fortune 500 brands, including Coca Cola and General Motors Corporation.

Dash published a novel by Dutton books and "The Making of Daughters of The Dust, published by The New Press. Recent retrospectives of her narrative film work have been held in Sweden, Beijing and Hong Kong University, China; Charleston, South Carolina, Creteil, France; Taipei, Taiwan; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She also served as chair of the International Jury at the Kerala International Film Festival in India.

She is currently in production on a feature-length documentary about Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a world-renowned author, performer and chef from rural South Carolina who led a remarkably unique and complex life. The film is based upon Grosvenor’s bestselling work, "Vibration Cooking: or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl."

Dash earned her MFA in Film & Television production at UCLA; and her B.A. in Film
Production from The City College of New York. She was also a Producing and Writing Conservatory Fellow at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies.