Julie Dash (1952- )

August 19, 2009

/ Contributed By: Dwayne Mack

Julie Dash

Filmmaker Julie Dash was born on October 22, 1952 in Queens, New York. She received her B.A. in film production from City College of New York in 1974 and went on to earn a two-year fellowship to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles. At AFI, Dash studied under filmmaker Jan Kadar and produced Four Women, an experimental dance film that received the 1978 Gold Medal for Women in Film award at the Miami International Film Festival. Dash continued her graduate studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she directed Diary of an African Nun, an adaptation of a short story by Alice Walker, in 1977. In 1985, she earned her M.F.A. in Film & Television production at UCLA.

In 1981, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded Dash a grant to research Gullah culture in the Sea Island communities of South Carolina and Georgia. Part of her research was included in her 1991 independent film, Daughters of the Dust. The groundbreaking Pan-African themed and female-centered film depicts a group of Gullah women celebrating their African ancestry. Daughters of the Dust was the first nationally released feature-length film by an African-American woman, and it won the best cinematography category at the Sundance Film Festival. The Library of Congress placed the film on its National Film Registry, joining a distinguished group of films preserved as national treasures.

Following the success of Daughters of the Dust, Dash continued to receive awards and honors for her film and television directing. Dash’s other dramatic films include Love Song, Incognito, and Funny Valentines. She wrote and directed an episode of Women for Showtime, as well as Sax Cantor Riff and HBO’s Subway Stories. She also directed the CBS television movie, The Rosa Parks Story, featuring Angela Basset. The film received several awards, including the NAACP Image Award, the Family Television Award, and the New York Christopher Award. In 2004, she directed Brothers of the Borderland, a short film for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. Recent directing credits include episodes of the OWN network’s Queen Sugar (season two) and Fox network’s Our Kind of People (2021).

Dash is the Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her film company, Geechee Girls, is based in the same city. In 2007, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Images of Black Women Film Festival.

She is married to Arthur Jafa Fielder, the cinematographer on her first feature, Daughers of the Dust. They have a daughter named N’Zinga.

About the Author

Author Profile

Dwayne Mack

Dwayne Mack is Associate Professor of history and affiliated faculty with African/African American Studies at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky where he holds the Carter G. Woodson Chair in African American History. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, attended college in North Carolina, and received his Ph.D. in American history at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, where he served as coordinator of the Talmadge Anderson Heritage House, the campus African American Cultural Center. He is the lead editor of Mentoring Faculty of Color: Essays on Professional Development and Advancement in Colleges and Universities (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2013). He is also the author of several peer reviewed articles and book chapters on the African American experience in the West and South. His work in progress includes a book manuscript, “We Have a Story to Tell: The African American Community in Spokane, Washington, 1945-1990.”

Categories:
African American History People in African American History

Tags:
20th Century (1900-1999) Gender - Women Media - Radio and Television Occupation-Filmmaker Performing Arts - Producers/Directors United States - California United States - New York

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CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Mack, D. (2009, August 19). Julie Dash (1952- ). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/dash-julie-1952/

Source of the Author's Information:

Vincent F. Rocchio, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro American Culture (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000); Norma Manatu, African American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2003); Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Lisa M. Anderson, Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women On Stage and Screen (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997); Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, New York. 2001); Phyllis R. Klotman, Screenplays of the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).