Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye was born in Liberia in 1966 but grew up in Philadelphia. She attended Temple University were she received a BA and then went on to complete her MFA at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross school of the Arts. It was there that she first began using the video art form to delve into class, race and sex in the lives of black women. In addition to filmmaking, Dunye is an avid writer, and has published articles for Felix, Time Out and Movement Research.

Cheryl Dunye is famous for her pseudo-documentary style of filmmaking, combining fiction and documentary to make what she’s nicknamed the “Dunyementary”. A lot of white feminist film, leans toward discarding usual narrative composition on the whole, but Dunye’s films keep hold of certain usual narrative structures but are laced with different techniques in terms of cinematic language. Her films challenge the received idea of documentary as a non-ideological kind of representation She feels that narrative is as true as w...