DMIS - Ayoka Chenzira Biography

Ayoka Chenzira is filmmaker, digital media and teaching artist who is a recognized pioneer in African-American independent cinema.

As a filmmaker, Chenzira has written, directed and produced numerous films and short subject digital media projects that span fiction, animation, documentary, performance and experimental narratives including the commercially released "Alma’s Rainbow" that was developed at Sundance Institute. This film is one of the first 35mm feature films written produced and directed by an African-American woman and noted on Billboard Magazine’s top-forty home video sales list. She has worked on special film commissions in Austria, the UK, Holland, Brazil and throughout Africa where she taught screenwriting and directing as part of South African initiative to develop the next generation of African filmmakers.

Chenzira’s films have appeared on American and European television and art houses; in addition, her films have appeared in numerous film festivals in the U.S., and in international festivals from Brazil to Egypt. There have been many retrospectives of her work around the world. Several of her productions have been translated into French and Japanese and are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

She has garnered many awards for her body of work including the Sony Innovator Award for her early work with converging film, video and computer animation; and the Apple Computer Distinguished Educator Award for her work with storytelling and digital technology. She has been celebrated as one of the most important African-American filmmakers.

Chenzira’s most recent work is in interactive digital media, which blends traditional filmmaking practices with various computer applications and sensing technologies to produce her vision of what she calls Haptic Cinema. This work has recently been presented at several prestigious venues including the FAMU International Film Program in Prague (2007), the Tangible Embedded Interaction (TEI) Conference in Germany (2008), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Singapore (2008).

In 2008, she was also invited to present her work at the Bahçeşehir University and the Design Cinema conference, both in Istanbul. In 2009, she was invited by the State Department to present her work at the New York Institute of Technology in Bahrain.

As a teaching artist, Chenizra is a professor of film and women’s studies, and founding director of the Digital Moving Image Salon (DMIS) at Spelman College where she arrived in 2001 to serve as the first William and Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Endowed Professor. She joined the faculty in 2003.

DMIS supports the growing number of Spelman students interested in film and digital media. Since its founding in 2003, DMIS has produced alumnae who have won Emmys, become part of Oprah’s Harpo Productions, presented their work at international festivals, become Fulbright scholars, and attended graduate school for film.

Prior to joining the faculty at Spelman, Chenzira was on faculty at the City College of New York for almost twenty years, and served as the chair of the department of media and communication arts. She co-created the MFA in media arts production, the only graduate-level program of its kind in New York.

Ayoka Chenzira is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University. In 2010 she will be among the first to receive a Ph.D. in the new digital media program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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