Breaking racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash became the first African American woman to have wide theatrical release for a feature narrative film. The Library of Congress placed Daughters of the Dust and her UCLA MFA senior thesis, Illusions, in the National Film Registry. These two films join a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures by the Librarian of Congress. In March 2024 A Dash of Excellence was held at the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC. Seeking: Mapping Our Gullah Geechee Story, written and directed by Dash and produced by the Ummah Chroma Creatives, at the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC. Mayor John J. Tecklenburg presented Julie Dash with an award from the White House, Joseph R. Biden’s President’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award for a lifelong commitment to building a stronger nation, the highest civilian honor for volunteer service in the United States.
Her recent television episodic work includes Reasonable Doubt seasons one and two for Disney+/ Hulu, the ABC limited series Women of The Movement, Our Kind of People for FOX/Hulu, and Queen Sugar for OWN TV. Dash has written and directed for CBS, BET, ENCORE STARZ, SHOWTIME, MTV Movies, HBO, and OWN Television. Her long-form narrative films include the NAACP Image Award-winning, Emmy, DGA nominated, The Rosa Parks Story, Incognito, Funny Valentines, Love Song, and Subway Stories: Tales From The Underground. Her work as a film director includes museum and theme park exhibits and design for Disney’s Imagineering, Brothers of the Borderland for The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum, and Smuggling Daydreams into Reality at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her most recent museum installations include Standing at The Scratch Line at the Philadelphia Museum of African American History and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Shine a Light, a large-scale video mapping projection for the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit.
Dash has several documentary projects in the works, including Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, a feature-length documentary in progress about Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a world-renowned author, performer, and chef from rural South Carolina. Julie Dash is a Fulbright Scholar who earned a BA in Film Studies from the City University of New York, an MFA in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, and an MFA in Theater Arts (Film & Television Production) at UCLA. She is the Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.