About the Event
Sisters in Cinema—which celebrates Black girls, women, and gender nonconforming media makers—hosts part of their 2025 series, The Black Women’s Film Canon, at the MCA this summer. The Black Women’s Film Canon is building a collection of essential and culturally significant films by Black women directors. For this iteration, Turner Classic Movies host Jacqueline Stewart joins director Ayoka Chenzira for a screening of her 1994 coming-of-age story, Alma’s Rainbow, followed by a live conversation.
Access Information
CART captioning is provided. To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.
About the Speakers
Ayoka Chenzira is an award-winning filmmaker and a recognized pioneer in Black independent cinema. She is part of a generation of African American filmmakers who helped create a genre of filmmaking now identified as Black independent cinema. Her distinctive body of work spans fiction, documentary, animation, performance, experimental narratives, interactive cinema, and television. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and is one of the first African American women to write, produce, and direct a 35mm feature film, Alma’s Rainbow (developed at Sundance Institute). She is considered the first African American woman animator with her animated satire, Hair Piece: a film for nappyheaded people and later Zajota and the Boogie Spirit. Hair Piece was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2018. Ayoka’s episode of Queen Sugar was nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award. There have been many international retrospectives of Ayoka’s films and several of her them are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jacqueline Stewart is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and host of “Silent Sunday Nights” on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). A 2021 MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship recipient, Stewart is an award-winning film historian, author, and archivist dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices in cinema. From 2022 until 2024, Stewart served as Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Author and editor of numerous publications, Stewart co-curated the five-disc set Pioneers of African American Cinema for Kino Lorber and serves as chair of the National Film Preservation Board. Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project, a community-centered archival program at the University of Chicago that is celebrating its 20th year in 2025.
Event Partner
This screening is co-sponsored and presented by Sisters in Cinema.
Sisters in Cinema is a Chicago-based non-profit with an inclusive mission to create a world where all Black women, girls and gender non-conforming media makers have equal opportunities to create and thrive.
Funding
Lead support for Learning programs at the MCA is provided by Jana and Bernardo Hees.
Major support is provided by Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund.
Additional generous support is provided by the Friends of Edwin A. Bergman Fund, the Hulda B. & Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation, Diane Kahan, The Marshall Frankel Foundation, and The William Randolph Hearst Foundations.