IMDB

Producer · Actor · Writer

1979-11-19 · United States · Male

5 series in the catalog

Barry Jenkins (born November 19, 1979) is an American filmmaker. After making his filmmaking debut with the short film My Josephine (2003), he directed his first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. He is also a member of the Chopstars collective as a creative collaborator.

Following an eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking, Jenkins directed and co-wrote the LGBTQ-themed independent drama Moonlight (2016), which won numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Jenkins received an Oscar nomination for Best Director and jointly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Tarell Alvin McCraney. He became the fourth Black person to be nominated for Best Director and the second Black person to direct a Best Picture winner. He released his third directorial feature, If Beale Street Could Talk, in 2018 to critical praise and screenplay-award nominations at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes.

He is also known for his work in television. Jenkins directed "Chapter V" of the Netflix series Dear White People in 2017. In 2021, he created and directed the Amazon Video limited series The Underground Railroad, based on the novel of the same name, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series or Movie nomination and a Peabody Award. In 2017, Jenkins was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

Early life

Jenkins was born on November 19, 1979, at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, the youngest of four siblings, each from a different father. His father separated from his mother while she was pregnant with Jenkins, believing that he was not Jenkins's father; he died when Jenkins was 12. Jenkins, in later life, still has "no idea who my 'real' father is". "I don't think any of us were planned, but I was definitely a mistake", he said later.

His mother, a nurse, was addicted to crack cocaine, and was a teenage runaway who Jenkins has said abandoned him. Jenkins grew up in Liberty City, a neighborhood of Miami, and was primarily raised by another older woman (who had also looked after his mother while she was a teenager) in an overcrowded apartment: "I wasn't raised by anyone who was a blood relative of mine, and yet I could see my blood relatives all around the neighborhood because things were just so, so bad". As a teenager Jenkins lived with friends from Miami Northwestern Senior High School, where he played football and ran track. His disordered and lonely childhood led him to retreat inwards and develop an active imagination. He hoped to pursue a creative-writing degree.

Jenkins studied film at the Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts (FSU), where he met many of his future frequent collaborators, including cinematographer James Laxton, producer Adele Romanski and editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon. His decision to study there was instigated by an initial visit: "I thought: This is the blackest place in America. I gotta be here". Feeling inadequate in terms of his technological skills, Jenkins took a year off to develop them. Jenkins felt a general lack of confidence at the start of the program, which began for Jenkins in a spontaneous manner. To resolve his personal misgivings, in a divergence from the inspirations of his classmates, he looked toward foreign arthouse cinema and directors like Wong Kar-wai, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Lynne Ramsay.

While at Florida State, Jenkins became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Four days after graduating from FSU, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a filmmaking career, spending two years working on various projects as a production assistant. He became disillusioned with "Hollywood film-making" after working for Harpo Productions, an experience which contrasted with his time studying film, reflecting that "At school, film-making had been the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me".

Career

2000s–2010s: Early work

Jenkins' first film was his 2001 short My Josephine, which follows the romantic life of a young Arabic-speaking man, following the September 11 attacks. Previously he had fretted over his chances of success due to his racial and class identity, but My Josephine demonstrated that "I could do the work to make myself as accomplished as anyone else". He then explored Black children being tried as adults for the deaths of their peers in Little Brown Boy.

He would later follow it up with Medicine for Melancholy. The film, which has been linked to the mumblecore scene, stars Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins. The impetus being the lack of low-budget mumblecore films which featured African-Americans, Jenkins recalled that the movie represented the "place where I was both physically, emotionally, and mentally". Well received by critics, the film underwent "the usual tour of festivals garnering its share of nominations, reviews, small awards and limited release distribution in major cities in 2009 and 2010".

Following Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins wrote multiple scripts: a time travel epic for Focus Features and adaptations of If Beale Street Could Talk and a memoir by Bill Clegg. He later worked as a carpenter and co-founded Strike Anywhere, an advertising company. In 2011, he wrote and directed Remigration, a sci-fi short film about gentrification. Jenkins became a writer for HBO's The Leftovers, about which he has said, "I didn't get to do much." In 2012, he received a United States Artists Fellowship grant. During this time period, he reckoned he matured as both a person and an artist. The lack of fruition with his scripts led him to consider if he was unable to produce another film; his next feature, he said, "just came to me".

2016: Moonlight

Jenkins directed and co-wrote, with Tarell Alvin McCraney, the 2016 drama Moonlight, his first feature film in eight years. It is an adaptation of McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Both writers' lives influenced the story, both having spent their childhoods in close proximity in Miami, Florida, although without knowing each other. While Jenkins found the main character, Chiron, reflective of himself, he did hold "some reservations and doubts" about adapting McCraney's play on account of being heterosexual; however, their shared characteristics and McCraney's trust in Jenkins emboldened him. Jenkins' screenplay – which he composed in ten days – expands upon McCraney's story, having more resources and control at his disposal than he had before. The movie was shot in 25 days, in Miami; the filming described by Naomie Harris as "very low-budget, it was very intimate film-making, collaborative". It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2016 to a substantial amount of awards and critical acclaim. According to film scholar Rahul Hamid, it was among the "most celebrated films of 2016, boasting... inclusion in all of the major top ten lists". "He became the breakout of the year", said Camonghne Felix.

The film won dozens of accolades, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture – Drama and the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards. Jenkins and McCraney also won Best Adapted Screenplay. Overall, the film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Director. Described as historic, Justin Gomer, scholar of American Studies, said that is "the most racially significant film to ever win", with it affecting the overall "whiteness" of the Oscars. Anthropologist Elizabeth Davis stated that Moonlight and similar films' acclaim indicates an "increase in the social and institutional recognition and approval of blackness". In 2022, in a poll of 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics, Sight and Sound crowned Moonlight as the 60th greatest film of all time.

2017–present: Further projects

In 2017, Jenkins directed the fifth…