Ayoka Chenzira

Chenzira is an arts administrator and lobbyist for independent cinema, distributing and exhibiting hundreds of films by African-American artists internationally. She is a founding board member of Production Partners in New York, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the visibility of African-American and Latino films. She was key in providing support for Charles Lane’s award-winning feature Sidewalk Stories (1989). She has also served as a media panelist for the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her contributions along with 14 other panelists for the Minority Task Force on Public Television resulted in the first Multicultural Public Television Fund.

In 2001, Chenzira was invited to serve as the first William and Camille Cosby Endowed Professor in the Arts at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. There, she created and directed the award-winning Digital Moving Image Salon (DMIS), a year-long research and documentary production course. She also created and served as co-director of Oral Narratives and Digital Technology, a joint venture between Spelman College and the Durham Institute of Technology (DIT) where she designed and taught workshops primarily for Zulu students at DIT. in 2015 Dr Chinezira's animated film Hair piece:a film for Nappyheaded people was exhibited by the whitney museum of American art. She was also invited to show her early films at Lincoln center as part of a celebration of black film makers titled " Tell it like it is : Black independents in New York, 1968–1986.

Chenzira left film for digital and transmedia storytelling in her work in the 2000s. She released the first part of HERadventure, an "interactive sci-if fantasy film" on her website and YouTube. Created by Chenzira and her daughter HaJ and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the part film and part interactive game has been accessible worldwide online since 2014. Her transition from film to a "transmedia storyteller" has been partly inspired by the new multitasking environments people inhabit: "parts of the story can be on a specific website while other parts can be accessed through a smartphone or on FaceBook, Instagram, etc. If you look around most people are doing more than one thing. They’re on phone while in conversation with someone else and also looking at some other screen. This is not the linear way of being in the world for which most people have been trained.”

In 1996, Chenzira was consultant to the M-Net Television of South Africa.

Chenzira produced and directed Alma's Rainbow in 1993, a "coming-of-age" comedy-drama about middle-class black women in Brooklyn. This was one of the first 35mm feature films produced, written and directed by an African-American woman. It is one of Billboard Magazine’s top 40 home video rentals. Through the course of the film, Alma Gold, her daughter Rainbow, and Rainbow’s semi-estranged Aunt Ruby work to reinstate themselves and their various types of “work” with a sense of value in society, to find happiness in life, love and finances. The film explores the tensions and pitfalls that arise in a journey of this nature—most paths are fraught with risk, while others should not be pursued under any circumstances. Though assumptions were made about the film on the “palette of the movie’s mise en scene”, “bubble gum dialogue” and “splashy costumes”, the subject matter had intellectual weight in its deconstruction of roles based on race, class, and gender. Chenzira dismantles the sexist, capitalist modes of patriarchy that negatively affect women's self-images within the working world; a struggle Black women face in “how to deprogram the ideological brainwashing they have received from the capitalist system without sacrificing the spiritual and economic success that such a system allows them access to through its lines of power.”

Chenzira won the 1991 Sony Innovator Award, and has been honored for her contributions to black cinema by the mayors of New York City and Detroit.

Chenzira is most well known for her 35mm feature films Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984) and Alma’s Rainbow (1993). Many of her recent works as a transmedia storyteller play with the increasingly digital world through art that combines material objects with digital environments, including Chenzira and her daughter HaJ's collaboration HERadventure (2013).

Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People is a 1984 satirical short film incorporating mixed media and animation to describe the emotional connection of black women and their hair. Chenzira said the film was inspired by the question, "Why is kinky hair seen as broken?" Chenzira, noted for her feminist topics, points out "self image for African-American women living in a society where beautiful hair is viewed as hair that blows in the wind". The pioneering short animated film tackles matters of space and personal rights for Black women and their bodies. The award-winning ten-minute, 16-mm color animation contrasts the hair experiences and culture of Black women against white beauty standards. Chenzira depicts the salon locale as an engaging space, calling for an initiation in scholarly and film discourse about Black hair culture and Black female agency. Using humor, music, and mixed media of magazine photographs, Chenzira examines African American beauty trends as well as issues for Black women from the early 1900s to the early 1980s.

Also in 1982, Secret Sounds Screaming: The Sexual Abuse of Children was a documentary sharing the experience of childhood sexual abuse from a distinctly black perspective. It was her first self-produced film.

Chenzira was one of a group of young black filmmakers who worked outside of mainstream financing and production systems for films. From 1981–1984, Chenzira was the programs director of the Black Filmmakers Foundation, where she helped promote and distribute black films. She was one of the first African-American women to produce a feature-length film, Alma's Rainbow (1993). In 1984, she was one of seven writer/directors selected for the Sundance Institute.

In the mid 1980s, Chenzira formed Red Carnelian, a New-York based production and distribution company focusing on media productions depicting life and culture of African Americans. The company has a successful distribution division, Black Indie Classics, and the company also provides film and video making instruction and opportunities to communities where individuals typically do not have access to the field of media production.

Chenzira attended private boarding school during high school. After graduating, she studied film and photography at The College of New Rochelle in Westchester, New York. She accomplished her M.A. degree in education at Columbia University. She received her B.F.A. degree in film production from New York University, where her thesis piece was Syvilla: They Dance To Her Drum (1979), "a short film that documented the African American concert dancer, Syvilla Fort, who was her dance teacher". She is the first African American to have earned her PhD in Digital Media Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Two of her films, 1979's Sylvilla: They Dance to her Dream and 1989's Zajota and the Boogie Spirit, are explorations of the role of dancing in black history. Sylvilla is a documentary exploring the life of Sylvilla Fort, who was trained by dancer Katherine Dunham and went on, herself, to train dancer Alvin Ailey. Zajota is an animated film about the path of Africans taken to America and the Caribbean. Chenzira said the film grew out of a sense that black Americans felt discomfort at the idea of dancing well.

Ayoka ("Ayo") Chenzira (born 1953) is an independent African-American producer, director, animator, writer, and experimental film and transmedia storyteller. She is the first African American woman animator and one of a handful of black experimental filmmakers working since the late 1970s. She has earned international acclaim for her experimental, documentary, animation, and cross-genre productions. Her work, as well as her efforts as one of the first African American woman film educator, have led some in the press to describe her as a media activist for social justice and challenging representations of African American stereotypes in the mainstream media.