Kasi Lemmons

Kasi Lemmons (born Karen Lemmons, February 24, 1961) is an American film director, screenwriter, and actress.

In 1979, Lemmons made her acting debut in the television movie 11th Victim (1979).

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.

She made her film debut in Spike Lee's School Daze (1988).

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 (1988), Vampire's Kiss (1988), the Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), Hard Target (1993), Fear of a Black Hat (1993), Gridlock'd (1997) and 'Til There Was You (1997).

She continued acting in Vampire's Kiss (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Candyman (1992).

She was described by film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon as "an ongoing testament to the creative possibilities of film".

Lemmons was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Dorothy Othello (née Stallworth) and Milton Francis Lemmons.

Her father was a biology teacher and her mother was a counselor who later became a psychologist.

In a 2021 episode of Finding Your Roots, Lemmons learned that her third-great-grandfather was transported to the United States from Africa in the early-19th century, and that she was a distant relative of actor Kevin Bacon.

Her parents divorced when she was eight years old.

Her mother moved the family to Newton, Massachusetts, because her mother wanted to go to Harvard to get her doctorate in education.

Her mother remarried when Lemmons was nine.

Lemmons attended Commonwealth School, a private high school in Boston.

In the summers, she attended the New York University's School of Drama's Circle in the Square Program, which trained children who wanted to be professional actors.

Through this program, she gained access to the studios of professional actors such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.

Alongside her early interest in movies and acting, Lemmons also harbored an interest in directing.

Lemmons began writing the screenplay for Eve's Bayou in 1992.

It was the first screenplay 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.

Eve's Bayou was well-received among critics (currently holding an 80% rate of approval on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes ) and won Lemmons an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature as well as a National Board of Review award for Outstanding Directorial Debut.

She made her directorial debut with Eve's Bayou (1997), followed by Talk to Me (2007), Black Nativity (2013), Harriet (2019), and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022).

In 1997, Lemmons directed the film Eve's Bayou starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Diahann Carroll, and Jurnee Smollett.

It was the highest-grossing independent film in 1997.

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.

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., played by Don Cheadle.

For the film, 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 2007 interview 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.

She also directed the Netflix limited series Self Made (2020), and an episode of ABC's Women of the Movement (2022).

She is also known as an actress having started her career with roles in commercials with McDonald's and Levi's.