Shari Lynette Carpenter
BOARD MEMBER
Shari Lynette Carpenter, an award winning writer/director, made her episodic television directing debut as part of Ava DuVernay’s groundbreaking all female directing staff on season six of OWN’s Queen Sugar. Her latest movie, Single Black Female, starring Amber Riley and Raven Goodwin, aired on Lifetime.
Other recent projects of Carpenter’s include the short docuseries #WhyWeCount Census 2020 Campaign and her film, Three’s Complicated, a romantic comedy that she both wrote and directed starring Shanola Hampton (Shameless) and Tyler Lepley (Harlem, P. Valley).
Carpenter says she came out of the womb with pencil in hand, a born storyteller and her film career all began with a fan letter written to the, then up and coming and now, legendary filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee gave Carpenter her first jobs in film and she eventually worked by his side as his script supervisor for more than a decade.
Carpenter wrote and directed the award winning short film Since Lisa (Winner at the Black Filmmaker Hall of Fame and Black American Cinema Society Festivals), which screened at more than two dozen film festivals, as well as several other shorts. Her feature directorial debut, Kali’s Vibe, a national and international festival favorite, garnered Jury, Audience and Vision awards. Her second feature, Building Girl, was the feature film debut of actress Gillian Jacobs (Community, Netflix’s Love). Carpenter’s PSA for Proctor and Gamble’s ‘My Black is Beautiful’ campaign was specially created to air during BET’S Black Girls Rock and to inspire and empower adolescent black girls. She directed the music video ‘We Are the Ones’ written by and featuring Emmy nominated performer Tituss Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schidmt).
Carpenter is a member of the DGA and Film Fatales, a women filmmaker's advocacy, resource and networking organization focused on gender parity in the film industry. She is a Rockefeller grant nominee, a Gordon Parks Award nominee, a Sundance Writer’s Lab finalist, a Stowe Story Labs alumna and Stowe Rep at Tribeca Institute Film Festival, an ABC Writer Development Fellow, an ABC Daytime Directing Apprentice and an IFP Project Involve: NY Fellow She has served as jurist and reader for Stowe Story Labs and Sidewalk Screenplay Competition.
She has written articles for Creative Screenwriting, Filmmaker, Cineaste and Essence magazines and was the Panel Chair for the Cinematic Arts discipline of The National YoungArts Foundation, an organization that identifies and nurtures the most accomplished young artists in the visual, literary, design and performing arts and assists them at critical junctures in their educational and professional development.
She is repped by Sola Fasehun at The Distribution Collective.
