Cheryl Dunye

City Arts & Lectures

This week, a conversation with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. Dunye first emerged in the 1990’s as part of the “Queer New Wave”, and much of her work explores questions of race and gender, using her own experience as a lens. Her debut feature film, “The Watermelon Woman”, is now considered a classic of queer cinema, and her style – a mixture of documentary aesthetic and fictive elements – has earned the term “Dunyementary”. Her films, including a collection of her documentary shorts, were recently added to the Criterion Channel. More recently, Dunye has directed television shows including “Dear White People”, “Queen Sugar”, and “Lovecraft Country”. On November 16, 2020, Cheryl Dunye talked with Ra Malika Imhotep, in a conversation co-presented with the Criterion Channel.