Shari Lynette Carpenter

Award winning writer/director Shari Lynette Carpenter made her episodic television directing debut as part of Ava DuVernay’s groundbreaking all female directing staff on Queen Sugar. Her first Lifetime movie, Single Black Female, starring Amber Riley and Raven Goodwin, was their highest viewed non holiday movie in 2022. Following that, she directed Mary J. Blige’s Strength of a Woman and Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge. Other recent projects of Carpenter’s include Three’s Complicated, a romantic comedy that she both wrote and directed starring Shanola Hampton (Found) and Tyler Lepley (Harlem, P. Valley).  Her short fiction film, Keepers of the Flame, an exploration of racism within the first women’s suffragette march in 1913, just completed a very successful festival run.  

An NYU graduate, Carpenter is currently part of the Paramount Global Directing Initiative and the Directors Guild of America’s Television Mentorship Program. She is an alum of the 2023 The Writers Lab (TWL). She is a Rockefeller grant nominee, a Gordon Parks Award nominee, a Sundance Writer’s Lab finalist, a Stowe Story Lab Board member and alumna, an ABC Writer Development Fellow, an ABC Daytime Directing Apprentice and an IFP Project Involve: NY Fellow.