Part 1

Terri made her television debut on Living Single and Sister Act 2 in 1993. Over the past 29 years, she has acted in over 60 films. These include Issa Rae’s Insecure, Oprah Winfrey’s Greenleaf, and Will Smith’s All of Us. In 2016, Terri moved into the director’s chair with a comedy called #DigitalLivesMatter, starring social media influencers Emmanuel Hudson and DC Young Fly. In 2018, she produced Merry Wishmas, starring veteran actors David and Tamela Mann. Terri continues to direct and produce popular shows on OWN TV, BET, and Bounce TV. She has a massive project with Disney in the pipeline.

Terri is a co-owner of Nina Holiday Entertainment, a film and television production company based in Atlanta. As an advisory board member for the African Film and Arts Foundation, Terri contributes to harnessing African arts and cinematic cultures.

Part 2

Part 3

She made her debut on the popular South African telenovela Isibaya. She later appeared on another telenovela, Scandal, as a troubled journalism student. Her first major appearance was in the series I’sithunzi, which was about four teenage girls who are forced into adulthood by unfair circumstances. This series explores deep societal ideas such as sexuality and socio-economic inequality. Because of her excellent work with I’sithunzi , Thuso was later nominated for the  Best Performance by an Actress Award in the 2017 International Emmy Awards. She was the only African nominated that year.

Source: The Underground Railroad

In 2021, Thuso made her first major international appearance on the Amazon historical series The Underground Railroad. This series was a success having been nominated in over 20 awards categories in 2021. From this series, Thuso was nominated for numerous awards, categories including Outstanding Performance, Best Actress, and Individual Achievement in drama. Thuso is now working on a new film Woman King, inspired by the 18th century Dahomey Kingdom, co-starring alongside Viola Davis. 

Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born in Anderson, South Carolina. In between playing basketball, practicing martial arts, and writing plays, he always dreamt of being an architect. After graduating high school, he was recruited to play basketball in college, but decided to pursue a degree in Directing from Howard University. He also studied Shakespeare at the University of Oxford, later joining the Shakespeare Company of New York, where he played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Malcolm in Macbeth.

Taken from Variety 

He worked extensively in the film and arts industry has been a director, actor, playwright, and film instructor. In the early 2000s, he directed George C. Wolfe’s The Coloured Museum and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. He also acted on television shows like All My Children, Lincoln Heights, Law and Order, and CSI: NY. His popular screenplay, Deep Azure, a play that explores issues of black-on-black violence and police brutality, was nominated for the 2006 Jeff Award for Best New Work. His first feature in a film was in 2008 on The Express: The Ernie Davis Story. He appeared on our screens again in 2010 on the series Persons Unknown. Since then, he has worked on more than 12 film projects.

When casting Black Panther, Marvel and Marvel fans agreed that he was a definite match. He even created a Wakadan accent of his own that he continued to use offscreen. His final film, Ma Rainey’s Blackbottom co-starring Viola Davis, and co-produced by Denzel Washington, skillfully sheds light on social issues through rhythm and blues. After this performance, he was posthumously nominated for Best Actor in the Golden Globe Awards, the Academy Awards, the British Film Academy Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Chadwick will be remembered for his valuable contribution to the film industry. In the hearts of many, he will always be King T’challa of Wakanda!

Even from the age of 23, Menelik had shown great passion and potential for creating black films with his first film project, Step Forward Youth, telling the stories of black Britons who were born in Britain but treated as immigrants. This project then led him to produce and direct more iconic works such as Blood Ah Go Mad and Burning an Illusion (1981), Time and Judgement (1988), and Looking for Love (2015). One of his most memorable works, The Story of Lovers Rock, which will be showcased at the September edition of Cinema for the Culture, explores the subgenre of romantic reggae, black love, and social activism.

Menelik will forever be remembered as a giant of culture and film. Mojisola Sonoiki, the founder and executive director of the African Film and Arts Foundation said the following about Menelik:

“I started my film festival with Menelik huddled up in a room in his office in East London. Over the years, As being part of the global Black Indie film circuit, you could not help but run into someone who knew Menelik, or who at least knew about his work. That showed the depth of his influence. The last time I reached out to Menelik was last year and I reminded him of the massive impact he left on me and how he was one of my inspirations to continue producing film festivals. Menelik understood that the only way our narrative as Black people globally could change, is if we are in control of telling our own stories, from our own perspective. Rest in peace Menelik and thank you for the great work you left us. Your legacy is set in stone”

Tomi Adeyemi was listed in Times Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2020 and was even called the ‘The New J.K Rowlings’. Adeyemi is a novelist and creative writing coach best known for her award-winning novel, Children of Blood and Bone. Born to Nigerian immigrants, Adeyemi grew up in Chicago where she spent most of her teenage years. Her father was a physician in Nigeria but worked as a taxi driver and her mother as a cleaner. She graduated from Harvard University and set her path to Salvador in Brazil where she studied West African mythology, religion, and culture and got the inspiration to write her debut novel, Children of Blood and Bone.

Released in March 2018, Children of Blood and Bone is about a girl who tries to restore magic to her kingdom following years of suppression of magical powers by the kingdom’s rulers. Shortly after its release, it hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult Hardcover Best Seller List. In the same year, it was awarded the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and later became a finalist for the 2019 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Her success was crowned by Disney announcing that Lucasfilm would be turning the book into a movie.  

Her second novel, a sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance was published in December 2019. It was ranked #1 on The New York Times bestseller that same month. To add to her list of stellar achievements, Adeyemi also coaches other upcoming writers to hone their creative writing on an online course she calls The Writer’s Roadmap. As fans eagerly wait for the movie, a third book to the trilogy is rumored to be released later this year.

Set under the reign of Queen Charlotte, who some historians believe was Black, Bridgerton broke norms of English period dramas by including a racially diverse cast. In an interview with NPR, Page shared his thoughts on Bridgerton’s racial diversity, saying, “I think it’s incredibly important that when we are indulging ourselves in these kind of great, big Cinderella fantasies, that everyone gets to see themselves as worthy of status and glamour and love and redemption.” He shared that in the process of creating the show, he wanted to “ to spotlight Black joy in a period drama, which is relatively unheard of and revolutionary in itself.” Since the release of Bridgerton, Page has hosted Saturday Night Live, was recently cast as the lead in the upcoming ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ film, and is rumored to be in the running for the role of James Bond.

The following year, Kaluuya portrayed W’Kabi in Black Panther, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster Marvel film about the fictional African nation of Wakanda. In 2019, he starred in romantic crime drama Queen & Slim, directed by Melina Matsoukas and written by award winning screenwriter Lena Waithe. Queen & Slim tells the story of a couple who are on the run after killing a police officer. Kaluuya will star in the upcoming film Judah and the Black Messiah, a biopic of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, set to come out in 2021. From an innovative thriller to a blockbusting superhero movie to a study of a celebrated activist, Kaluuya’s films have spanned topics and genres, making him an incredibly versatile and exciting actor to watch.

This year, she was selected as a member of the 2020 class of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.. In 2018, the film Lionheart, which she directed and starred in, was acquired by Netflix, making it the first Netflix Original out of Nigeria. This year, Lionheart was nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film as Nigeria’s first Oscars submission. However, the film was ultimately disqualified since the majority of the film is in English, while the Academy requires international submissions to have a majority of non-English dialogue.

Nnaji expressed disappointment with the decision, writing, “We did not choose who colonised us.” Although Lionheart lost out on the award opportunity, Nnaji believes the film’s Netflix acquisition will open up many other opportunities for Nigerian film, such as expanded viewership and funding opportunities from outside of the continent. Ultimately, Nnaji says she sees the deal as a “pivotal moment in the history of Nigerian cinema.”

Coel graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2012. Her final project at Guildhall, a play called Chewing Gum Dreams, received critical acclaim and was later adapted into the Channel 4 sitcom Chewing Gum, for which Coel earned two BAFTAs. Despite Chewing Gum’s success, Coel recalls difficulties in its production as she was kept out of much of the creative process. She noticed this phenomenon again when she originally pitched her series I May Destroy You to Netflix and was offered $1 Million upfront but none of the copyright. She declined this offer, and in her keynote address at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, shared that she was discouraged about the British television industry’s seeming unwillingness to extend equitable creative opportunities to underrepresented filmmakers, whom she calls “misfits.” 

This year, however, I May Destroy You finally came to the screen. BBC offered Coel full creative control of the series; she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in I May Destroy You, a fictionalized account of Coel’s own sexual assault. The series follows Arabella, a young writer in London, as she navigates her social life, relationships, and career in the wake of a traumatic sexual assault. I May Destroy You has received overwhelming praise, and is a testament to what television can achieve when production studios hand over full creative control to filmmakers like Coel.

The film is a day-in-a-life portrait of three police officers in Montfermeil, France, who have a series of increasingly fraught interactions with local youth as the day passes. Ly himself is from Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris with a large African and Arab migrant population. 

Montfermeil is also where Victor Hugo wrote the novel Les Miserables and set some of its action. Ly’s re-use of Hugo’s title highlights both the immense changes the area has experienced and the lasting truth of Hugo’s observations; Ly makes the same effort that Hugo did to empathize with each side of a conflict while remaining critical of their actions. 

Ly’s examination of the struggles citizens of Montfermeil face also pushes back against mounting anti-immigrant sentiment from France’s far-right. Les Misérables urges its viewers to understand that the migrant communities depicted in the film belong to the French tradition just as much as the characters in Hugo’s novel. 

In an interview with IndieWire, Ly spoke on the conditions which have prompted African migration to European countries like France, an issue relevant both to the film and to his own experiences as the son of Malian migrants.

“You can’t complain about immigrants coming into your country without taking the time to really think about why they are so desperate, that some risk their lives,” Ly said. “When you investigate the history of colonialism, neo-colonialism, the looting of Africa’s natural resources, and Europe and the West’s responsibility, then you will begin to understand.”