HOLLYWOOD’S BLACK RENAISSANCE -- As with the first season, the second season of “Queen Sugar” has an all-female directorial team, paving the way for helmers new to television. Cheryl Dunye is one of the legendary directors of the second season of the critically acclaimed OWN series.
Dunye began her career with six short films which have been collected on DVD as “The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye.” Her feature debut was “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), a film which explored the history of black women and lesbians in film, and made cinematic history as the first feature-length narrative film written and directed by an out black lesbian about black lesbians.
Dunye’s second feature was the HBO-produced television movie “Stranger Inside,” and she went on to direct “My Baby’s Daddy” in 2004 and “The Owls” in 2010. In addition to making films, Dunye is an assistant professor of Cinema at SF State and a recent recipient of the prestigious 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Dunye is constantly engaging audiences with socially compelling content that defies the stereotypes of how women and people of color have been depicted on screen, and we are looking forward to the magic that she will bring to season two of “Queen Sugar.”