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Barry Jenkins

Academy Award-winner Barry Jenkins’ feature film debut, Medicine for Melancholy, was hailed as one of the best films of 2009 by The New York Times and received several Independent Spirit and Gotham Award nominations. In 2017, along with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with his second feature, Moonlight, winner of both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Picture. As well as earning eight Academy Award nominations, ten Broadcast Critics Choice Awards nominations, six Golden Globe nominations, and four BAFTA nominations, Moonlight won Best Picture and Director at the Gotham Awards and Best International Film from the British Independent Film Awards. In addition to NYFCC and NBR awarding Jenkins Best Director and LAFCA naming him Best Director and the film Best Picture, Jenkins received a DGA Best Director nomination and won the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay. His third fea- ture, the adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, went on to receive three Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Jenkins also received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director. Jenkins’ next directorial feature film projects include a follow-up to The Lion King for Walt Disney Studios and a biopic of famed choreographer Alvin Ailey for Searchlight Pictures. Jenkins serves as a producer on Aftersun from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells.

For television, Jenkins was showrunner and co-wrote and directed all ten episodes of the critically acclaimed adaptation series of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award-winning novel, for Amazon. The show won the BAFTA for Best Interna- tional Series and a Golden Globe for Best Limited Se- ries/Anthology/Motion Picture Made for Television. It also garnered seven Primetime EMMY nominations, a PGA nomination, and a WGA nomination, while Jen- kins won the DGA for Best Director for a TV Movie/Limited Series. In addition, Jenkins directed an episode in the first season of the Netflix Original Series Dear White People.

Other upcoming work includes a script based on the life of Clarissa “T-Rex” Shields, the first American female Olympic boxing champ, as well as an adaptation of Netflix’s original documentary Virunga, about the bat- tle to save the Congo’s mountain gorilla population.

Special Guests 2022

Special Guests in Other Editions