Kasi Lemmons
Kasi Lemmons is an American film director and actress.
She began her career with roles in commercials with McDonald's and Levis, then she moved to the small screen with shows such as 11th Victim and then moved to the big screen in Spike Lee's School Daze, followed by the comedy Vampire's Kiss, before being cast as Ardelia Mapp in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs. She subsequently co-starred with Virginia Madsen in the horror film Candyman.
Lemmons made her directorial debut with 1997's Eve's Bayou, followed by Dr. Hugo, The Caveman's Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and her highest-grossing film, 2019's Harriet, about abolitionist Harriet Tubman. She was described by film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon as "an ongoing testament to the creative possibilities of film."
Lemmons adapted the novel Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow into an opera libretto for the composer Terence Blanchard. It was premiered by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on 15 June 2019.
Early life
Lemmons was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a biology teacher and her mom was a counselor and then became a psychologist. When she was eight years old, her parents divorced, and she and her mother and two sisters moved to Newton, Massachusetts, because her mom wanted to go to Harvard to get her doctorate in education. Her mother remarried when she was nine.Lemmons went to Commonwealth School, a small private high school in Boston, Mass. In the summer, she attended the Circle in the Square Program, a program where kids who wanted to be professional actors trained, which was part of New York University’s School of Drama. This gave her access to many professional actors’ studios such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.
Lemmons started her film career as an actress and her passion for movies came at an early age, but her goal was to become a director as she states, "I wanted to do something more meaningful than going to auditions…"
As well as attending New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, UCLA and The New School of Social Research Film Program, Lemmons was awarded an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Salem State College in 1998. Currently, she is an Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Career
Acting
In 1979, Lemmons made her acting debut in the television movie 11th Victim . She performed with the Boston Children's Theater and later attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts but transferred to UCLA to major in history. She eventually left UCLA and enrolled in the film program at the New School for Social Research. As a young child, she got her first role on TV on a local soap opera called You Got a Right, a courtroom drama. She played the first and only black girl who integrated to an all-white school. Her acting credits include episodic parts on shows like As the World Turns, Murder, She Wrote, The Cosby Show or ER and films such as Spike Lee's School Daze, Vampire's Kiss, the Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Silence of the Lambs, Candyman, Hard Target, Fear of a Black Hat, Gridlock'd and 'Til There Was You.Filmmaking
In 1997, Lemmons directed the film Eve's Bayou starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Diahann Carroll, and Jurnee Smollett. Lemmons had begun to write the screenplay for Eve’s Bayou in 1992. This was the first screenplay that she had written by herself. To convince studios that she could direct Eve’s Bayou, she filmed Dr. Hugo, a short film based on a section of the script of Eve’s Bayou. The film was well-received among critics and won Lemmons an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature as well as a National Board of Review award for Outstanding Directorial Debut. It was the highest-grossing independent film in 1997.In 2001 she directed Jackson again in The Caveman's Valentine about a schizophrenic homeless man trying to solve a murder mystery. In 2002 Lemmons conceived and helmed the tribute to Sidney Poitier for the 74th Annual Academy Award show. Shortly afterwards it was announced that Lemmons would direct The Battle of Cloverfield, a supernatural thriller, from her own script for Columbia Pictures.
In 2007, she directed Talk to Me that was centered around the television personality and activist Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr. that was played by Don Cheadle. For the film Talk to Me, Lemmons received the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture and was named as Best Director by the African-American Film Critics Association. In a with FF2 Media's Jan Lisa Huttner, Lemmons said Talk to Me "became a film about a time when change was possible and even revolution was possible. We didn’t know what was going to happen. It was a very devastating time and a very frightening time, but it was alive. It was alive."
Lemmons adapted the Broadway musical Black Nativity and filmed it in 2013. It starred Academy Award winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson, as well as Academy Award nominee Angela Bassett.
Lemmons's 2019 film Harriet, a biographical film about Harriet Tubman, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Its star, Cynthia Erivo, was nominated for an Academy Award. Lemmons said to the Los Angeles Times about her research for Harriet: “All the elements of a great adventure film are right there in the Harriet Tubman story. It’s about a woman who was running a whole lot of her life so action did not have to be imposed. It’s inherent. The jeopardy, the movement, the courage, that’s all inherent and we wanted to let that play out on screen because we need our female hero stories. This one is about a tiny black woman who did incredible things.”
Lemmons explained during an interview that she considered writing to be central to her task as a director: "I've been writing scripts all the time, pretty much every day for fourteen years.... I have to write scripts, because that's the only way I can write parts that will get a lot of people whom I really want to work with involved."
Teaching
Lemmons has worked extensively as a mentor and educator. For the past 14 years she has been a board member of Film Independent and has contributed to Film Independent’s Filmmaker Labs as a speaker and moderator. She also continues to serve as an advisor to the Sundance Screenwriter and Filmmaker Labs. Guest lecturing and speaking engagements include Yale University, Columbia Film School, MIT, UCLA, USC, The Los Angeles Film School and The University of Pristina Film School in Kosovo. Kasi was Vassar College’s 2008 Artist in Residence and in the 2010-2011 academic year, Lemmons was the UCLA Regents’ Lecturer in the School of Theater, Film & Television. She was also the leader/moderator of the AFI curriculum’s core class, Narrative Workshop.Personal life
Lemmons has been married to actor and director Vondie Curtis-Hall since 1995. The couple has four children.Lemmons says she is primarily an artist: "I don't wake up every day saying I'm a black woman because it's too given, but I wake up every day feeling like an artist and I feel I'm an artist".