Meet Ayoka Chenzira, the multi-talented and award-winning filmmaker, Emmy and NAACP nominated director, and digital media artist.

As a child, Ayoka discovered her interest in storytelling while listening to women converse in her mother’s Philadelphia beauty parlor. With a background in modern dance, photography, and music, she discovered her passion for filmmaking after being taken to every age-inappropriate movie that her cinephile parent could find. Since then, Ayoka is known to work across a range of genres, including drama, science fiction, documentary, animation, and interactive cinema. As an actor’s director, able to work with various acting styles and degrees of experience, Ayoka’s visionary style of storytelling and character development takes center stage as does her ability to elevate a story emotionally and visually.

 Ayoka’s indie films highlight stories about Black women and have been exhibited at international film festivals around the world, and acquired by prestigious institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is one of the first African American women to write, produce and direct a 35mm feature film, Alma’s Rainbow, which was recently restored by the Academy Film Archive, The Film Foundation, and Milestone Films with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

 As a self-taught stop motion animator and digital media artist, Ayoka has used these techniques to explore American history and concepts related to identity and standards of beauty for Black women. In 2018, her animated film Hair Piece was one of twenty-five films inducted into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress along with Jurassic Park, The Shining, and Brokeback Mountain. Her film, Zajota & the Boogie Spirit was one of the first to use frame-by-frame video blended with cell and computer animation, and for which she was honored with the Sony Innovator Award.

In 2018, Ayoka’s television career began when Ava DuVernay asked her to direct episodes of OWN’s hit family drama Queen Sugar, starring Rutina Wesley, Dawn-Lien Gardner and Kofi Siriboe, for which she garnered an NAACP nomination. Since Queen Sugar, Ayoka has worked non-stop as a television director, drawing on her years of experience as a filmmaker. She is known for her visual style, inventiveness, and technical skills while being a creative partner and collaborator.

 Ayoka directed episodes of the CBS reboot of the iconic series Dynasty, starring Elizabeth Gillies and Grant Show, who reprised the role of Blake Carrington. As a director of young adult fiction, she was nominated for an Emmy for the award-winning Netflix drama Trinkets featuring Quintessa Swindell, Brianna Hildebrand, and Kiana Madeira.

Pivoting to the carefully crafted world of a period drama series, Ayoka was one of four directors selected by Sony/Amazon to direct the sports comedy-drama, A League of Their Own, based on the beloved Penny Marshall film of the same title and starring Abbi Jacobson, D’Arcy Carden, Chanté Adams, and Nick Offerman, for which she received an Emmy nomination for directing.

Blending history and science fiction, as one of four directors of the FX series Kindred, Ayoka navigated two time periods for the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s celebrated and critically acclaimed novel. Working with historians, Ayoka introduced visual representations of culture and intimidation in inventive ways that became part of the narrative.

A lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, in 2022 Ayoka directed the Spectrum/AMC psychological thriller Beacon 23, based on the novel by The New York Times best-selling author, Hugh Howey and starring Lena Headey (Game of Thrones) and Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk). Ayoka’s episode was filmed entirely across four sound stages and included substantial visual effects and face replacements for body doubles. Working with a choreographer, she developed a unique sign language; with composers Ramin Djawadi (Pacific Rim, Game of Thrones, Iron Man), and William Marriott (Westworld, Game of Thrones, Jack Ryan) she helped create chants sung by an outer space community of rebels.

Ayoka broke new ground with her production of HERadventure, a sci-fi/fantasy interactive cinema project that uses gameplay to navigate the story. The project was first presented in 2013 at South-by-Southwest where it was projected onto a building as players navigated the coming-of-age story featuring a reluctant young woman from another planet who comes to Earth to find her sister and ends up a superhero. The first interactive cinema project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, HERadventure features a first for the interactive cinema genre — a woman of color as a superhero. The project led to an invitation by TEDxAtlanta where Ayoka presented the Power of Diverse Sci-fi/Fantasy Storytellers.

 Ayoka earned a BFA in Film from New York University, an Ed.M. in Adult and Higher Education from Columbia University/Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the first African American to earn a PhD in Digital Media from the George Institute of Technology. She is professor emerita of Spelman College, a leading women’s college dedicated to the education and global leadership of Black women. At Spelman, Ayoka was the Diana King Endowed Professor of Film, Television, and Related Media. She served as the Division Chair for the Arts at Spelman College, where she created majors in documentary filmmaking, photography, and dance performance & choreography, the firsts at an HBCU. In addition, Ayoka helped to raise funds for the new Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts, currently under construction where a documentary film production lab will bear her name.

In 2022, Bowie State University, in partnership with the award-winning animation studio LAIKA, named its new stop-motion animation space in honor of Ayoka.

With an impressive track record of success and dedication to storytelling, Ayoka Chenzira is a filmmaker, television director, and digital media artist to continue to watch.

Ayoka lives in Atlanta and is dedicated to centralizing complicated women protagonists and elevating stories by and about women.