Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins was born in Miami, Florida, United States on November 19th, 1979 and is the Director. At the age of 44, Barry Jenkins biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 44 years old, Barry Jenkins has this physical status:
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'd 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: an epic for Focus Features about "Stevie Wonder and time travel" 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".
Jenkins directed and co-wrote, with Tarell Alvin McCraney, the 2016 drama Moonlight, his first feature film in eight years. It's an adaptation of McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Both lives influenced the production, having spent their childhoods in close proximity although without knowing each other; Jenkins found the main character, Chiron, reflective of himself. Jenkins 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, scholar of American Studies, Justin Gomer 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 2017, Jenkins directed the fifth episode of the Netflix original series Dear White People, having been chosen due to his work on Moonlight. In line with the show's other directors, Jenkins' work was guided by an overall visual framework, although he was encouraged to be distinctive.
In 2013, the same year he wrote Moonlight, Jenkins had written a film adaptation of James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk. Production began in October 2017 with Annapurna Pictures, Pastel, and Plan B. Jenkins worked closely with Baldwin's estate and was given handwritten notes about how he would have approached a film version – "a slow epiphany" is how Jenkins described reading the notes. The adaptation is largely faithful to the source material, although aspects, such as the opening and ending, are changed. The film was released in December 2018 to critical acclaim. It garnered numerous accolades, including Best Supporting Actress wins for Regina King at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes. Jenkins received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Aided by his previous television work, Jenkins directed the 2021 television series adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad, the series being a passion project for Jenkins. It was initiated by Amazon Studios (and subsequently ordered to series in June 2018) after Jenkins' strong Oscar haul for Moonlight. The main cast of The Underground Railroad includes Thuso Mbedu as Cora, with Chase W. Dillon as Homer and Aaron Pierre as Caesar.
"[Bringing] together a group of disparate artists", Jenkins and the casting director, Francine Maisler, searched worldwide for an actor to play Cora and sought those then-undiscovered. The series' creation was deeply personal – with Jenkins once receiving an assessment by the on-set therapist. It proved to be the most difficult project of his career yet with him feeling a closer attachment to his ancestral past. The show was met with critical acclaim; it was the most recent entry to the BBC's 2021 list of the 21st century's greatest TV shows.
The next major film Jenkins is set to direct is Mufasa: The Lion King, a prequel to the CGI remake of Disney's The Lion King that primarily concerns the coming of age origins of Mufasa. Upcoming projects include a screenplay adapting Virunga, another based on the life of boxer Claressa Shields titled Flint Strong, and a biographical film about choreographer Alvin Ailey which he will direct. More recently, his Pastel production company signed a first look deal with HBO, HBO Max and A24.