Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Maria Prince-Bythewood (born June 10, 1969) is an American film director and screenwriter.

In 1987, Prince-Bythewood graduated from Pacific Grove High School.

She attended UCLA's film school, where she also ran competitive track.

At UCLA, she received the Gene Reynolds Scholarship for Directing and the Ray Stark Memorial Scholarship for Outstanding Undergraduates.

She began her career as a writer for multiple television shows in the 1990s, including the anthology series CBS Schoolbreak Special, for which she was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards.

She graduated in 1991.

Prince-Bythewood made her feature film directorial debut with Love & Basketball (2000), for which she received an Independent Spirit Award.

Her other works include Disappearing Acts (2000), The Secret Life of Bees (2008), and Beyond the Lights (2014).

After five years working in TV as a writer on shows like A Different World and South Central, Prince-Bythewood wrote her first film, 2000's Love & Basketball. The film was based on Prince-Bythewood’s personal life and her experiences growing up.

It was developed at the Sundance Institute's directing and writing lab.

It won 12 awards and was nominated for three more.

It won Best Film and Best Film Poster at the Black Reel Awards, and Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The film also grossed $27.7 million worldwide, making it the ninth most popular basketball film in the United States at that time.

She directed the feature film The Secret Life of Bees, adapted from the best-selling book by Sue Monk Kidd.

Prince-Bythewood began work on the film in 2007, before work on 2008's The Secret Life of Bees was completed, but struggled to find financing when the original production company, Sony, backed out after she insisted on casting Mbatha-Raw.

It was released by Fox Searchlight in October 2008, and debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and Urbanworld Film Festival that same year.

She sought out her birth mother around 2014, but it was "not a positive experience".

Her birth mother, who is white, was a teenager when she gave her up for adoption, because her family knew her child would be multiracial and they wanted her to have an abortion.

In 2014, Prince-Bythewood directed Beyond the Lights, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

The film premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Beyond the Lights, originally called Blackbird, is based on the Nina Simone song "Blackbird" from the record Nina Simone with Strings.

Prince-Bythewood said: "That song really inspired the movie and inspired Noni's story."

The main character's story was loosely inspired by the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland.

Prince-Bythewood also stated that the movie is filled with intense personal issues with some resulting from her own adoption and her fraught encounter with her birth mother.

Prince-Bythewood did research with the assistance of a number of singers, including Alicia Keys.

The story was also inspired by an experience seeing Keys play the song "Diary".

Elements of the film, especially the sexualization of female pop artists, act as a "critique of American media culture."

The film was shot in 29 days and cost $7 million.

All of the key crew members on the film were women, including costume designer Sandra Hernandez, production designer Cecilia Montiel, cinematographer Tami Reiker, and editor Teri Shropshire.

Other collaborators were choreographer Laurieann Gibson (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj), hairstylist Kimberly Kimble (Beyoncé), and record producer The-Dream.

In 2016 Prince-Bythewood announced her next project would be an adaptation of Roxane Gay's novel An Untamed State.

The project would be co-written by herself and Gay and would star Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

In 2017 Prince-Bythewood, along with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood, created the show Shots Fired for Fox.

Later that year, Prince-Bythewood was announced as the director for Silver & Black, a film based on Marvel Comics characters Silver Sable and Black Cat.

She became the first black woman to direct a major comic-book film The Old Guard (2020).

Prince-Bythewood earned nominations for Best Director at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards and the British Academy Film Awards for The Woman King (2022).

Prince-Bythewood was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted by Bob Prince, a computer programmer, and Maria Prince, a nurse, when she was 3 weeks old.

Her adoptive father is white and her adoptive mother is of Salvadoran and German descent.

She grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of Pacific Grove, California.

She has four siblings through her adoptive family.