Chinonye Chukwu


Chinonye Chukwu is a Nigerian-American film director best known for the drama film Clemency. She is the first black woman to win the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Early life

Chukwu was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. When she was just over a year old, her family moved to Oklahoma, and moved again to Fairbanks, Alaska when she was six. They visited Nigeria often.
Growing up in Alaska, Chukwu was often the only person of color in her classes, and she struggled to fit in. Throughout her childhood she dealt with depression, which was exacerbated by limited wintertime daylight in Alaska. To cope, she read Maya Angelou and joined the weight-lifting club. Chukwu always wanted to make movies. In her teen years she carried around a journal that she would write down ideas for films and music videos. She often wrote stories about Nigerian-American girls reconnecting with loves or lost siblings.
She received her bachelor's degree in English from DePauw University. She then enrolled in film school at Temple University.

Career

Chukwu directed The Dance Lesson in 2010, about a young black girl who struggles to become a ballerina in an increasingly gentrified community. Her first feature film, Alaska-Land, told the story of two estranged Nigerian-American brother and sister who eventually reunite in their hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska. The film was rejected from every festival and lab program she applied to. In 2013 she directed A Long Walk, a short film about a child who is publicly ridiculed by his father.
Clemency was written and directed by Chukwu. The death row drama, starring Alfre Woodard as a prison warden coming to terms with the demands of her profession and Aldis Hodge as one of her inmates bound for execution. Her inspiration for the film came from the case of Troy Davis, a prisoner executed in 2011. She moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to shoot the film. She received the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2019, the first black woman to do so.
Chukwu is slated to direct A Taste Of Power, a film based on the memoir of Elaine Brown.

Awards and nominations

''The Dance Lesson'' (2010)