Ayoka Chenzira

Ayoka Chenzira

Still: Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People
Ayoka CHENZIRA (1953, US) is an award-winning filmmaker and a recognised pioneer in Black independent cinema. She is part of a generation of African American filmmakers who helped create a genre of filmmaking now identified as Black independent cinema. Her distinctive body of work spans fiction, documentary, animation, performance, experimental narratives, interactive cinema and television. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and is one of the first African American women to write, produce and direct a 35mm feature film, Alma's Rainbow (1993). She is considered the first African American woman animator with her animated satire, Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984) and later Zajota and the Boogie Spirit (1990). Hair Piece was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2018 and will be shown at IFFR 2024. There have been many international retrospectives of Ayoka's films and several of her them are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Filmography

Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum (1979, short), Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984, short), Secret Sounds Screaming (1985, short), On Becoming a Woman (1986), The Lure and the Lore (1989, short), Zajota and the Boogie Spirit (1990, short), Pull Your Head to the Moon (1992, TV short), Alma's Rainbow (1993), MOTV (My Own TV) Snowfire (1994, short), Sentry at the Gate: The Comedy of Jane Galvin-Lewis (1995), In the Rivers of Mercy Angst (1997, short), HERadventure (2014)