Lena Waithe, Storm Reid & Five Other Black Girls Who’ll Take 2018 By Storm

Source: Essence

Let’s start off the year by saluting just how much of a banner year this will be for Lena Waithe, Storm Reid and black women in front of and behind the camera.

2018 is here and it already looks like it is shaping up to be a banner year for black women in film and TV—in front of and behind the camera. They include two award-winning creatives from Chicago, a director part of the Queen Sugar roster, and the teen star of a $100 million Disney movie.

Source: IMDB

Lena Waithe

Fresh off her historic Emmy win for best comedy writing for her “Thanksgiving” episode of Master of None, Waithe will be ringing in the new year with the debut of The Chi, her TV series about growing up on the Southside of Chicago. While there have been plenty of shows about Chicago, only a handful have actually shot in Chicago—and fewer still venture past the Magnificent Mile to depict a multifaceted view of the souls of black folk in the city.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Storm Reid

Storm Reid, who made her debut in Steve McQueen’s award-winning film 12 Years A Slave, will be headlining Ava DuVernay’s $100 million adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, which will hit theaters on March 9. As DuVernay described in a recent interview, Reid will play Meg Murry, “this girl of color [who] saves the universe. Not just the world, multiple planets and galaxies. That’s just such a radical idea, as a woman of color, as anyone who’s outside of the industry construct of who’s usually put forth as the hero.”

Source: Filmmaker Magazine

Nijla Mu’min

This rising Oakland-based filmmaker will debut her film Jinn in 2018. The film, which stars Zoe Renee (The Quad) and Simone Missick (Luke Cage), follows a teenage girl whose life is turned upside down when her mother abruptly converts to Islam.

Source: Mythos Magazine

Tchaiko Omawale

Keep an eye out for Solace, Tchaiko Omawale’s feature film debut that tackles a silent problem among black girls: eating disorders. The film stars legendary actors Lynn Whitfield and Glynn Turman and rising star Hope Olaide Wilson, who was also in the most recent season of Showtime’s The Affair.

Source: Twitter

Sam Bailey

This Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker burst on the scene with two award-winning web series: You’re So Talented and Brown Girls. The latter series, which she created along with Chicago-based poet Fatimah Asghar, was nominated for an Emmy and will now be developed into a series on HBO.

Source: Life + Times

Victoria Mahoney

This filmmaker, who started out as a theater and film actress, will be heading up reboot of the British sci-fi cult classic Misfits for Freeform. She also directed 2011 feature Yelling to the Sky, and directed episodes of Queen Sugar, the dearly departed Survivor’s Remorse, and Claws.

Misha Green. No matter that Underground, her series about slavery and resistance in the antebellum South, was cancelled by WGN after two seasons. Misha Green is still working and making moves. She will be the writer of a new HBO horror series, Lovecraft Country, produced by Jordan Peele. The series, based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, follows Atticus Black as he embarks on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America to find his father after he goes missing. Green was also recently tapped to write and produce a remake of the 1973 cult Blaxploitation classic Cleopatra Jones.

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Danielle A. Scruggs is a Chicago-based photographer and writer who runs the website Black Women Directors and is also the Director of Photography at the Chicago Reader, an award-winning alt-weekly newspaper. Follow her on Twitter at @dascruggs and view her site at daniellescruggs.com.