Black Visions: L.A. Rebellion

Thirty-one years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, becoming the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. Dash is a director, writer and producer who has written and directed for CBS, BET, ENCORE STARZ, SHOWTIME, MTV Movies, HBO and OWN Television. She directed the NAACP Image Award-winning, Emmy and DGA nominated The Rosa Parks Story, as well as Incognito, Funny Valentines, Love Song, and Subway Stories: Tales From The Underground.

Her work is widely exhibited, including Brothers of the Borderland at The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum, and Smuggling Daydreams into Reality at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Most recently, an installation of her short film Standing at The Scratch Line, was exhibited at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a large-scale video mapping projection, Shine a Light, for the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit. She has also worked on theme park design with Disney Imagineering.

Dash is the recipient of the Special Award at the 82nd New York Film Critics Circle, the 2017 Women & Hollywood Trailblazer Award, the 2017 New York Women in Film & Television MUSE Award, and The Ebert Award. In 2022, she received Joseph R. Biden’s President’s Lifetime Achievement Award for a lifelong commitment to building a stronger nation through volunteer service. She earned an MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, an MFA in Theater Arts (Film & Television Production) at UCLA, and she received a BA in film production from CCNY. Dash is the Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.

Bryant Griffin is an Emmy award-winning Los Angeles-based writer/director with an MFA in directing from UCLA. Bryant crafts character-based stories centered around marginalized and underrepresented communities. Bryant’s first narrative feature film, Young King, is currently playing at multiple film festivals across the country and was a finalist for the 2020 Sundance Development track, a semifinalist for the Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and the recipient of the Arri Franz Wieser Grant in 2021. Bryant premiered the feature documentary "L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement" on KCET's Artbound Series, the Los Angeles PBS affiliate, in October, co-directed with Kitty Hu, which won the LA Area Emmy award in the Education/Information category. The film retells the personal experiences of the UCLA film school's first diverse group of filmmakers in 1969. Prior to directing, Bryant spent 12 years as a visual effects artist and supervisor at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). During that period, he worked on over 50 feature films and television series, directed by filmmakers such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Guillermo Del Toro on films including Marvel Studios' Avengers, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Indiana Jones, and Pacific Rim. Bryant's VFX clients have included CBS, Amazon Studios, Hulu, Paramount +, Max, FX, Netflix, and Google.

Kitty Hu is a queer, Chinese documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Shoes Off Media. As the daughter of immigrants, Kitty’s work amplifies character-driven stories that reflect the work of our social movements, looking at topics like labor, housing, culture, migration and climate. She recently directed the Emmy-award winning “L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement” (PBS Artbound) and produced “Taste the Nation” (Hulu), “Wild Hope” (PBS), “Take Out” (HBO Max), and “America Outdoors” (PBS). She is also a proud member of BGDM and A-Doc.