Julie Dash

Renowned for being almost too ahead of her time, filmmaker Julie Dash was perhaps best known for directing the landmark 1992 period drama "Daughters of the Dust" (1992). Born in New York, Dash earned her undergraduate degree from the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts at City College of New York, later procuring an MFA from UCLA Film School. Among her first major projects was writing and directing the short "Working Models of Success" (1973) for the New York Urban Coalition. She would then direct short films like "Four Women" (1975) and "Illusions" (1982) in addition to commercials and PSAs. When Dash finally broke through with her feature film debut, "Daughters of the Dust," she became the first African-American woman to have a full-length general theatrical release in the United States. The movie's impeccably curated visuals, intense but subtle themes, and well paced momentum made it a major phenomenon, and yet the film failed to garner Dash new feature film opportunities, as major and even minor studios remained dumbfounded about how to market films made by and about African-American women. She would spend the next several years either making films without the aid of the studio system, like 1999's "Funny Valentines" (1999), or directing movies for TV, like "Incognito" (BET, 1999) and "Love Song" (MTV, 2000). In 2017, Dash returned to the big screen, directing the documentary "Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" (2017).