Conversations from the Sundance Film Festival | The Big Conversation: Reclaiming the Narrative with Nikyatu Jusu (NANNY) & more

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Sierra Leonean-American Filmmaker Nikyatu's films have screened at festivals nationally and internationally. With a BA from Duke University and an MFA from NYU's Tisch Grad Film school, she's earned various awards including NYU’s Spike Lee Fellowship Award, the Princess Grace Narrative film grant and Director’s Guild of America Honorable Mentions. Three of her shorts were acquired by and aired on HBO, her most recent being Flowers, which she co-wrote and co-directed.  

Nikyatu's feature screenplay Free The Town was one of 12 projects invited to participate in Sundance Institute’s inaugural Diverse Writers Workshop. Additionally FTT was hand selected for Africa’s most prestigious Film Market, the 2013 Durban Film Mart and one of 5 narrative films selected for Film Independent's Fast Track.

Her latest film Suicide By Sunlight: a project funded by THROUGH HER LENS sponsored by the Tribeca Film Institute and Chanel, made its debut at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and is currently touring the festival circuit. She is in development on the original series based on Suicide By Sunlight. 

Nikyatu is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University where she teaches Screenwriting and Directing. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. He is a university professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

David Blight is Sterling Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale. He is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

CJ Hunt is a comedian and filmmaker. He has been a field producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and The Rundown with Robin Thede. A fellow with New America and Firelight Media, CJ is also the director of The Neutral Ground, a documentary about monuments, memory, and breaking up with the Confederacy. The film won Best Documentary at American Black Film Festival and is nominated for Best Score at the upcoming IDA Awards.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, the host of the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, the moderator of the webinar series Under the Blacklight, and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School. She is popularly known for her development of “intersectionality,” “critical race theory,” and the #SayHerName campaign; she is a leading authority on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. In early 2021, Crenshaw received the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of American Law Schools.