Cheryl Dunye (; born May 13, 1966) is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. She is the daughter of Edith Irene Hamilton Dunye and George Kekura Dunye. She was born in Liberia, but shortly after, her family moved to Philadelphia. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Early life Dunye was born in Monrovia, Liberia and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She first attended Michigan State University, where she was in the political theory program due to her desire to make a change and have an impact on the world.
When she realized she could use media as a tool in her political activism, she ended up in the filmmaking program at Temple University in Philadelphia. She received her BA from Temple and her MFA from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of Art. While at Temple University, Dunye made her first ever video project for her senior thesis which was a montage of images of things like newspapers that she had recorded and played over a reading of a poem by Sapphire called "Wild Thing."
Career
Dunye began her filmmaking career in the early 1990s with a series of short films that blended documentary and narrative techniques, which she termed “Dunyementaries.” These works, produced between 1990 and 1994, explored themes of race, sexuality, and identity from the perspective of a Black lesbian filmmaker.
Her feature film debut, The Watermelon Woman (1996), brought her widespread recognition and is considered a landmark in independent cinema. The film, which Dunye wrote, directed, and starred in, addresses the absence of Black lesbian representation in film history and has been widely discussed in film scholarship.
In 2001, Dunye directed the HBO film Stranger Inside, a drama centered on the lives of incarcerated African American women. The production incorporated elements of realism, including casting formerly incarcerated individuals.
Dunye later directed the studio comedy My Baby's Daddy (2004), marking a shift into mainstream filmmaking, while continuing to work in independent cinema with projects such as The Owls (2010), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Her subsequent work includes Mommy Is Coming (2012) and the short film Black Is Blue (2014), both of which continued her exploration of sexuality, identity, and marginalized communities.
In addition to filmmaking, Dunye has had a significant academic career, teaching at institutions including the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of the Arts, and San Francisco State University.
In 2016, Dunye was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of filmmaking, selected from nearly 3,000 applicants. That same year, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
Dunye has also directed for television, contributing to series such as Queen Sugar and Dear White People, further expanding her work into episodic storytelling.
Academics She has taught at the UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, Pitzer College, Claremont Graduate University, Pomona College, California Institute of the Arts, The New School of Social Research, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco State University.
The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye Dunye began her career with six short films which have been collected on DVD as The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye. Most of these videos feature the use of mixed media, a blurring of fact and fiction and explored issues relating to the director's experience as a black lesbian filmmaker. These films are early examples of "Dunyementaries," a self-coined blend of narrative and documentary techniques that Dunye describes as "a mix of film, video, friends, and a lot of heart." These works, spanning from 1990 to 1994, explore themes of race, sexuality, family, relationships, whiteness, and the intricacies of white and black lesbian dating culture.Dunye, Cheryl. (Director). (1994). The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye [Motion picture on DVD]. United States: First Run Features. Dunye's early works were produced with a low budget and often starred Dunye herself as lead actress.
Janine (1990) Before Cheryl Dunye became a household name, she first blurred the lines between fact and fiction with the short film "Janine"(experimental documentary, 1990), the story of a black lesbian's relationship with a white, upper middle class high school girl." This experimental documentary follows Dunye's narration of her friendship with a high school classmate, Janine Sorelli. Dunye describes her crush on Janine that spanned from 9th to 12th grade. Dunye explains that Janine's wealthy middle class lifestyle made Dunye feel out of place and uncomfortable with her own identity. Their relationship ended after their senior year of high school when, after Dunye came out to Janine as gay, Janine's mother offered to pay for a doctor to "talk to somebody about [her] problems."
Dunye describes her experience working on Janine as an external expression of her personal struggles. Dunye says, "The issues I raise in Janine aren't easy ones, and I struggle with them daily. Rather than internalizing them, I put them in my videos." As Dunye says when discussing Janine, she finds it important to represent herself in her work "physically and autobiographically," and states that her work has two goals: to educate audiences unfamiliar with black lesbians and their communities and to empower and entertain other black lesbians through representation in her films.
She Don't Fade (1991) (Experimental narrative, 1991) "A self-reflexive look at the sexuality of a young black lesbian." This film follows the sexual pursuits of Shae Clarke, an African American lesbian. Clarke, played by Dunye, defines and readily demonstrates her "new approach to women." The Criterion Channel describes it as "A smart, hilarious, and self-reflexive look at the sexuality of a young black lesbian."Criterion Channel review of She Don't Fade (1991), criterionchannel.com. Accessed December 5, 2023. Electronic Arts Intermix says "Dunye cleverly combines humour and storytelling to relay a tale of adventure and conquest within the realm of sexuality.
Vanilla Sex (1992) (Experimental documentary, 1992) "This four-minute experimental documentary features Dunye's voice in conversation with an offscreen character, played over photography and found footage. Dunye's narration describes the different meanings of the term vanilla sex which, to white lesbians, meant sex without toys while, to black lesbians, meant sex with white women. Dunye uses the opportunity to explore and discuss the different meanings of such a term in two different contexts between the white and black lesbian communities."
An Untitled Portrait (1993) (Video montage, 1993) "Dunye's relationship with her brother is examined in this mixture of appropriated film footage, super 8mm home movies & Dunye's special brand of humor."
The Potluck and the Passion (1993) (Experimental narrative, 1993) The Potluck and the Passion "paints a picture of a couple's one year anniversary, where they host a potluck, each inviting their own friends to enhance the evening." "Sparks fly as racial, sexual and social politics intermingle at a lesbian potluck."
Greetings from Africa (1994) (Narrative, 1994) "Cheryl, playing herself, humorously experiences the mysteries of lesbian dating in the 90s." Greetings from Africa (1994) is a narrative short film featuring Dunye as Cheryl, a young adult black lesbian working to navigate the complicated world of lesbian dating in the 90s. The film opens with Cheryl narrating in front of a camera about her efforts to get back into the dating scene while attempting to avoid the common pitfall of lesbian serial monogamy. After this opening, Cheryl meets L, a white woman, at a party. L and Cheryl hit it off, and soon meet for a date. Before their date, Cheryl and a friend discuss L, mentioning that Cheryl's friend knew someone had recently seen L at the African American studies department office at a nearby school. Later, after Cheryl has not heard from L for a few days, she attends a party hoping to see L there. Cheryl strikes up a conversation with another black queer woman at the party. Cheryl is surprised to find the woman is not L's old roommate, as L had told Cheryl, but rather her girlfriend. The film concludes with Cheryl reading a greeting card from L with the tagline, "Greetings from Africa." The postcard reads that L has joined the Peace Corps and was currently living and working on the Ivory Coast in Africa. This film explores themes of black fetishization as L is depicted to have had multiple relationships with black women, also implied by her presence at the African American Studies Department and her final postcard labelled, "Greetings from Africa."
The Watermelon Woman (1996)
Her feature film debut was The Watermelon Woman (1996), an exploration of the history of black women and lesbians in film. "[It] has earned a place in cinematic history as the first feature-length narrative film written and directed by out black lesbian about black lesbians." In 1993 Dunye was doing research for a class on black film history, by looking for information on black actresses in early films. Many times the credits for these women were left out of the film. Frustrated by a lack in the archives, Dunye created a fictional character, Fae Richards, and constructed an archive for that character. Thus, Dunye utilized fiction and the arts to address gaps she noted in official records. She decided that she was going to use her work to create a story for black women in early films. The film's title is a play on the Melvin Van Peebles's film The Watermelon Man (1970). Dunye then used the creative archival material to curate events to raise funds and show progress to donors.
In the film, the protagonist Cheryl, played by the director, is an aspiring black lesbian filmmaker attempting to bring about the history of black lesbians in cinematic history while attempting to produce her own work because "our stories have never been told." Cheryl the protagonist becomes fascinated by an actress she finds in a movie called Plantation Memories and decides she wants to learn everything there is to know about the actress listed only as "Watermelon Woman" in the credits of the film. The story explores the difficulty in navigating archival sources that either excludes or ignores black queer women working in Hollywood, particularly that of actress Fae Richards whose character bore the name that provides the title for the film. In conducting research for the film, Dunye utilized the Library of Congress and materials on Ira Jeffries in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which was parodied as the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (C.L.I.T.) in the film. Dunye and photographer Zoe Leonard collaborated to stage and construct The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-1996 to be used in the film. The series was used to fundraise for the film's production through a sale at A.I.R. Gallery, and appeared in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. In 2016, the film was restored and rereleased widely for its 20th anniversary and resides in the permanent cinema collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In 2021, The Watermelon Woman was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In July 2023, The Watermelon Woman was released by the Criterion Collection in a 2K digital restoration supervised by Dunye, making it one of the few films by a Black lesbian filmmaker to enter the collection.
Production