Julie Ethel Dash (born October 22, 1952) is an American filmmaker, music video and commercial director, author, and website producer. Dash received her MFA in 1985 at the UCLA Film School and is one of the graduates and filmmakers known as the L.A. Rebellion.
The L.A. Rebellion refers to the first African and African-American students who studied film at UCLA. Through their collective efforts, they sought to put an end to the prejudices of Hollywood by creating experimental and unconventional films. The main goal of these films was to create original Black stories and bring them to the main screens. After Dash had written and directed several shorts, her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust became the first full-length film directed by an African-American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States. In 2004, Daughters of the Dust was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its "cultural, historical and aesthetic significance". Stemming from the film's success, Dash also released novels of the same title in 1992 and 1999. The film was later a key inspiration for Beyoncé's 2016 album Lemonade.
Daughters of the Dust is a fictionalized telling of her father's Gullah family who lived off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in 1902. Maintaining strong ties to African culture, traditions, and language, the Peazant family reflects on the significance of their planned migration to the U.S. mainland. The film features black women's stories, striking visuals shot on location and a non-linear narrative. Dash has written two books on Daughters of the Dust—a "making of" history co-written with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks, and a sequel, set 20 years after the film's story. Daughters of the Dust continues to have a widespread cultural impact today, as it was named one of the most significant films of the last 30 years, by IndieWire.
Dash has worked in television since the late 1990s. Her television movies include Funny Valentines (1999), Incognito (1999), Love Song (2000), and The Rosa Parks Story (2002), starring Angela Bassett. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center commissioned Dash to direct Brothers of the Borderland in 2004, as an immersive film exhibit narrated by Oprah Winfrey following the path of women gaining freedom on the Underground Railroad. In 2017, Dash directed episodes of Queen Sugar on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Continuing her work in television, Dash has directed episodes of several TV series, namely Our Kind of People, Women of the Movement, and Reasonable Doubt, throughout 2021 and 2022.
At the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, it was announced Dash's next major project will be a biopic of civil rights activist Angela Davis, to be produced by Lionsgate.
As of 2017, along with working in television, Dash was named a Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. At Spelman, Dash is helping to develop a documentary filmmaking major. She has expressed that she enjoys using her "mechanical imagination" in her classes, focusing on elements such as frame composition and lighting. While using editing software like Premiere Pro in class, she mentioned in an interview that she misses having filmstrips around her neck.
Dash is also a member of the Directors Guild of America, as she has been a member since 1996.
Dash was born on October 22, 1952, in Queens, New York, to Rhudine Henderson and Charles Edward Dash. She graduated from Jamaica High School then, went on to receive a B.A. in film production from the City College of New York in 1974. She was raised in the Queensbridge Housing Project in Long Island City, Queens. She studied in 1969 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As an undergraduate, she studied psychology until she was accepted into the film school at the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts at City Colleges of New York, CCNY. In 1974, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Film Production. As a student, Dash wrote the script for a documentary for the New York Urban Coalition, titled Working Models of Success.
After graduating from CCNY, she moved to Los Angeles for graduate studies. She completed a two-year Conservatory Fellowship in Producing/Writing at AFI Conservatory. There she studied under filmmakers, including Ján Kadár, William Friedkin, and Slavko Vorkapich. She attended graduate school at the UCLA Film School and became one of a new generation of African and African-American filmmakers known as the "Black insurgents" or L.A. Rebellion.
She directed Working Models of Success (1976), and the next year, produced Four Women (1975), a short dance film based on a song by Nina Simone. It won a gold medal for Women in Film in the 1978 Miami International Film Festival. As a graduate student at UCLA, she received an MFA in Film and Television Production. She directed the film Diary of an African Nun (1977). Screened at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, it earned a Directors Guild Award for a Student Film.
During film school, Dash was influenced by avant-garde, Latin American, African, and Russian cinema. Dash's film work began to take on a new direction after film school. Dash said in a 1991 interview with the Village Voice: "I stopped making documentaries after discovering Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker. I wondered, why can't we see movies like this? I realized I needed to learn how to make narrative movies." Being inspired by the novels of these black women authors led to her decision to direct dramatic films.
Her 1975 short film Four Women is based on the ballad "Four Women" by Nina Simone. In the song, four women are portrayed (all by the dancer Linda Martina Young): Aunt Sarah, a slave, Saffronia, a mixed-race woman, Sweet Thing, a prostitute, and Peaches, as a representation of black women overcoming racial and gender-specific forms of oppression. The first character shown is Aunt Sarah who wears a long dress and represents slavery. The next character is Saffronia who wears a black dress and a black veil. She is a mixed-race woman who is the product of her mother being raped by a white man. The next character, Sweet Thing, is a prostitute. She wears a floral print dress and she is no longer covered by a veil. The last character is Peaches, who represents a black woman who has been toughened by generations of oppression. She wears cornrows, a brightly colored tube top, and matching pants. The overall message of this short is to show the different struggles that many black women are subjected to. Stereotypes of black women are directly addressed, asking the audience to address their own biases and stereotypes.
From 1978 to 1980, Dash worked as member of the Classifications and Ratings Administrations for the Motion Picture Association of America. She had a special assignment screening at the Cannes International Film Festival to review a screening of short films in the Marché du Cinema.
Diary of an African Nun (1977)
Dash's 1977 short film Diary of an African Nun (13 minutes) was made during her tenure at UCLA. Adapted from Alice Walker's short story of the same name, this feature follows a young nun (Barbara O. Jones) in Uganda who is riddled with emptiness and doubt as she ponders her vows and union with Christ. As the nights wear on, the rhythmic beating of drums in the village intensifies her anguish and worsens her anxieties. The graphic simplicity within Diary of an African Nun coupled with Dash's poetic and political style won her a Directors Guild Award for student filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film Exposition. This style of narrative filmmaking directly challenged the conventions upheld by a longstanding history of white, male production. Diary of an African Nun is equipped with a certain intensity that foreshadows Dash's later works such as Daughters of the Dust.
She wrote and directed the short film Illusions (34 minutes), which explores racial and sexual discrimination in Hollywood and American society. Released in 1982, it was her first to earn more widespread success and attention. Set in 1942 in the fictional National Studios, it follows a black woman executive, Mignon Duprée, who has "passed" for white to achieve her position. Also featured is Ester Jeeter, a black woman who dubs the singing voice in musicals for a white Hollywood star. They work in an industry based on creating images and alternative realities. The film explores Mignon's dilemma, Ester's struggle to get roles as an actress and singer rather than dub for others, and the uses of cinema in wartime: three illusions in conflict with reality.