Ava DuVernay
Filmmaker and founder/ ARRAY
Ava DuVernay is talking about the old days—back when she first started making films. She’s saying how there weren’t many role models for Black women filmmakers, no safety net for the kinds of projects she’d become known for: Selma, 13th, When They See Us. And then she stops suddenly to marvel: “I’m talking like I made films 40 years ago—it was about 10 years ago when my first film was released! But there was no one to look at and go, ‘Oh, this woman, she’s made 10 films.’”
So in 2011, DuVernay created her own safety net. She founded the independent distribution company ARRAY (then known as AFFRM), which has since grown into a narrative collective offering content, production, programming, distribution, and nonprofit services like education, funding, and event spaces—all of which function as a kind of springboard for underheard voices in the film and television industry. “What it’s become is an incubator of disruptive ideas, which has been really beautiful,” DuVernay says. Recent successes include White Tiger, Lingua Franca, Queen Sugar, and They’ve Gotta Have Us.
“One of my film mentors is Haile Gerima,” says DuVernay, “who taught at Howard University and owned a small bookstore and cafe. He had a small editing room in the office above the bookstore, and that’s where he could always make his films. He called it his ‘liberated territory.’ With ARRAY, I have a liberated territory. If Hollywood kicks me out, decides it doesn’t want me there, I can always do my thing over here.”
But back when DuVernay started ARRAY, she already had some skills that made her confident she could tell a powerful story—and run a company, for that matter. Before becoming a filmmaker, she’d headed up her own
