Creating your own lane: Ava DuVernay's art and entrepreneurship

This thesis is an in-depth study of Ava DuVernay’s filmmaking career over a ten-year period. It focuses on six productions by the director – Selma (2014), Queen Sugar (2016-2022), 13TH (2016), When They See Us (2019), Colin in Black & White (2021), and Origin (2023) – connecting formal analysis with an examination of sociopolitical and industrial shifts in media between 2013 and 2023, a decade marking DuVernay’s entrance into Hollywood and return to a mode of independent filmmaking. My discussion of these productions is framed by genre theory and an argument that DuVernay adopts different genres during this period – including melodrama, documentary/docudrama, and the biopic – in order to broaden her storytelling practices, offering more nuanced characterizations of the lives of Black people while simultaneously advancing her commitment to exploring social justice issues through art. I also consider the impact of DuVernay’s arts resource collective, ARRAY, on the director’s participation in the industry and her attempt to challenge structural and racial biases at the height of her engagement with major studios, and Netflix in particular. This thesis charts DuVernay’s career from her transition to filmmaking after working as a film publicist, her major productions in Hollywood including three projects with Netflix, and a recent return to independent filmmaking with her latest film. In this pivotal decade and across these six productions, I argue, DuVernay has become an increasingly influential and versatile Black woman filmmaker, using the independent media infrastructure she has created with ARRAY to sustain her career in the face of ongoing racial and gender disparities in the industry.