Shola Lynch is a Diana King Endowed Professor of the Art and Visual Culture department.
Shola Lynch is an award-winning American filmmaker. Her latest documentary, Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Women in Hollywood, premiered on Apple TV+ in 2025. It has won a special Critics’ Choice award for Black Cinema and is nominated for two 2026 NAACP Image Awards, best television documentary and best documentary director.
Shola is best known for the Image Award-winning feature documentary FREE ANGELA & All Political Prisoners and the Peabody Award-winning documentary CHISHOLM ’72: Unbought & Unbossed. Her independent film body of work and her other collaborative projects feed her passion to bring history alive with captivating stories of people, places, and events.
She is now honored to inspire a new generation of storytellers as the Diana King Endowed Professor and the Director of the Documentary Filmmaking Program at Spelman College.
From 2013 – 2024, Shola served as the Curator of the Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 2016, Shola became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
She is currently completing a documentary about Reverend Jesse Jackson. She is also working on a passion project about the American sprinter, icon, and still world record holder in the women’s 100m and 200m, Florence Griffith Joyner.
Shola believes deeply in the value of preserving history and its power in storytelling.
For more: sholalynch.com