Tina Mabry

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1978, Tina Mabry felt the pull of filmmaking when she was a student at Ole Miss. She left her home state and headed to Los Angeles, where she enrolled in and graduated from the prestigious USC School of Fine Arts Cinema and Television Masters program. Her first produced screenplay was "The Itty Bitty Titty Committee" (2007), which premiered at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and won the Jury Prize for Best Feature at the 2007 SXSW Film Festival. Mabry made her directorial debut with the film "Mississippi Damned" (2009), a semi-autobiographical story about a group of poor black kids in rural Mississippi, which made its premiere at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival. She wrote and directed two episodes of the ITVS (an arm of PBS) anthology series "Futurestates" (ITVS, 2010-2014), before taking on the feature "An American Girl Story: Melody 1963: Love Has to Win" (2016) from the successful franchise. The same year, Mabry took on the role of producer, writer, and sometime director on the series "Queen Sugar" (OWN, 2016-), a show also produced by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey.