Do we like Ava DuVernay?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record of backing filmmakers of colour and women, plus LGBTQ+ inclusion, with one contested political position and a messy defamation fight.
DuVernay's big swing was 13th, the 2016 documentary on the 13th Amendment, and she has spent the years since pushing stories that Hollywood sat on. Her nonprofit ARRAY got a Peabody Institutional Award in 2021 for amplifying film and TV by filmmakers of colour and women. Her 2023 feature Origin was a half-dramatisation of Isabel Wilkerson's work on caste, and she told Deadline she wasn't after agreement, just engagement.
The messiest chapter was the court fight over When They See Us, her Central Park Five series. Former prosecutor Linda Fairstein sued in 2020, alleging defamation over how the series portrayed her, and the case settled in 2024 just before trial. Netflix agreed to donate $1 million to the Innocence Project, Fairstein got no money, and future streams carry a note that parts were fictionalised. DuVernay said Fairstein dropped the case to dodge cross-examination, and Fairstein's lawyer said she would have won.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. GLAAD named her for its Excellence in Media Award in 2018, citing LGBTQ+ people on both sides of the camera at her shows. The one contested thing is that she signed the 2025 Film Workers for Palestine pledge not to work with Israeli film institutions the pledge says are implicated in genocide and apartheid. Where you land depends on whether you read that as a stand on human rights or as a blanket boycott that's too broad; she's one of more than 1,300 signers.
She's not above a heated moment online. In 2020 a Daily Beast opinion piece accused her of going after a Vogue staffer on Twitter and tagging the staffer's employer. DuVernay's side of that wasn't in the piece, and it's one episode in a long career, not a pattern the sources show.
14th is the recent headline. Announcing it in July, she said that if 13th asked who gets caged, 14th asks who gets counted. It lands after the Supreme Court struck down Trump's birthright citizenship order 6-3 in June, so the film is entering a live fight and will draw plenty of cheering and plenty of heat.
The real good stuff: in 2020 ARRAY's nonprofit arm launched a $250,000 fund for independent festivals and screening series that centre people of colour and women of all kinds. Fourteen $10,000 grants had already gone out when it was reported. That's money going to other people, not just trophies.