Product Code Database
Barry Jenkins (born November 19, 1979) is an American filmmaker. After making his filmmaking debut with the short film My Josephine (2003), he directed his first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. He is also a member of the Chopstars collective as a creative collaborator.
Following an eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking, Jenkins directed and co-wrote the LGBTQ-themed independent drama Moonlight (2016), which won numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Jenkins received an Academy Awards nomination for Best Director and jointly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Tarell Alvin McCraney. He became the fourth Black person to be nominated for Best Director and the second Black person to direct a Best Picture winner. He released his third directorial feature, If Beale Street Could Talk, in 2018 to critical praise and screenplay-award nominations at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes.
He is also known for his work in television. Jenkins directed "Chapter V" of the Netflix series Dear White People in 2017. In 2021, he created and directed the Amazon Video limited series The Underground Railroad, based on the novel of the same name, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series or Movie nomination and a Peabody Award. In 2017, Jenkins was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
His mother, a nurse, was addicted to crack cocaine, and was a teenage runaway who Jenkins has said abandoned him. Jenkins grew up in Liberty City, a neighborhood of Miami, and was primarily raised by another older woman (who had also looked after his mother while she was a teenager) in an overcrowded apartment: "I wasn't raised by anyone who was a blood relative of mine, and yet I could see my blood relatives all around the neighborhood because things were just so, so bad". As a teenager Jenkins lived with friends from Miami Northwestern Senior High School, where he played football and ran track. His disordered and lonely childhood led him to retreat inwards and develop an active imagination. He hoped to pursue a creative-writing degree.
Jenkins studied film at the Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts (FSU), where he met many of his future frequent collaborators, including cinematographer James Laxton, producer Adele Romanski and editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon. His decision to study there was instigated by an initial visit: "I thought: This is the blackest place in America. I gotta be here". Feeling inadequate in terms of his technological skills, Jenkins took a year off to develop them. Jenkins felt a general lack of confidence at the start of the program, which began for Jenkins in a spontaneous manner. To resolve his personal misgivings, in a divergence from the inspirations of his classmates, he looked toward foreign arthouse cinema and directors like Wong Kar-wai, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Lynne Ramsay.
While at Florida State, Jenkins became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Four days after graduating from FSU, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a filmmaking career, spending two years working on various projects as a production assistant. He became disillusioned with "Hollywood film-making" after working for Harpo Productions, an experience which contrasted with his time studying film, reflecting that "At school, film-making had been the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me".
He would later follow it up with Medicine for Melancholy. The film, which has been linked to the mumblecore scene, stars Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins. The impetus being the lack of low-budget mumblecore films which featured African-Americans, Jenkins recalled that the movie represented the "place where I was both physically, emotionally, and mentally". Well received by critics, the film underwent "the usual tour of festivals garnering its share of nominations, reviews, small awards and limited release distribution in major cities in 2009 and 2010".
Following Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins wrote multiple scripts: a time travel epic for Focus Features and adaptations of If Beale Street Could Talk and a memoir by Bill Clegg. He later worked as a carpenter and co-founded Strike Anywhere, an advertising company. In 2011, he wrote and directed Remigration, a sci-fi short film about gentrification. Jenkins became a writer for HBO's The Leftovers, about which he has said, "I didn't get to do much." In 2012, he received a United States Artists Fellowship grant. During this time period, he reckoned he matured as both a person and an artist. The lack of fruition with his scripts led him to consider if he was unable to produce another film; his next feature, he said, "just came to me".
The film won dozens of accolades, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture – Drama and the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards. Jenkins and McCraney also won Best Adapted Screenplay. Overall, the film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Director. Described as historic, Justin Gomer, scholar of American Studies, said that is "the most racially significant film to ever win", with it affecting the overall April Reign. Anthropologist Elizabeth Davis stated that Moonlight and similar films' acclaim indicates an "increase in the social and institutional recognition and approval of blackness". In 2022, in a poll of 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics, Sight and Sound crowned Moonlight as the 60th greatest film of all time.
Aided by his previous television work, Jenkins directed the 2021 television series adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad, the series being a passion project for Jenkins. It was initiated by Amazon Studios (and subsequently ordered to series in June 2018) after Jenkins' strong Oscar haul for Moonlight. The main cast of The Underground Railroad includes Thuso Mbedu as Cora, with Chase W. Dillon as Homer and Aaron Pierre as Caesar.
"Bringing together a group of disparate artists", Jenkins and the casting director, Francine Maisler, searched worldwide for an actor to play Cora and sought those then-undiscovered. The series' creation was deeply personal – with Jenkins once receiving an assessment by the on-set therapist. It proved to be the most difficult project of his career yet with him feeling a closer attachment to his Genealogy. The show was met with critical acclaim; it was the most recent entry to the BBC's 2021 list of the 21st century's greatest TV shows. In 2024, he wrote a screenplay based on the life of boxer Claressa Shields titled The Fire Inside and directed , a prequel to the CGI remake of Disney's The Lion King that primarily concerns the coming of age origins of Mufasa.
More recently, his Pastel production company signed a first look deal with HBO, HBO Max and A24. In 2023 he was slated to serve as head of the Platform Prize jury at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.John Hazelton, "Toronto unveils 2023 Platform line-up; 'Dream Scenario' with Nicolas Cage to open". Screen Daily, August 2, 2023.
In 2025, he signed to direct Universal's Science fiction thriller The Natural Order, starring Glen Powell and based on an upcoming novel of the same name by Matthew Aldrich, who would co-write the screenplay alongside Jenkins. Jenkins also signed on to direct Zendaya in A24's biopic on the life of Ronettes singer Ronnie Spector, Be My Baby. The film, being written by Dave Kajganich, was to focus on a specific moment of Spector's life, namely her relationship with troubled producer Phil Spector.
In an interview in 2016, Jenkins revealed that in the aftermath of Medicine for Melancholy he wrote and developed a manic-sounding Epic film about "Stevie Wonder and time travel," involving a mysterious mansion in Harlem and a vintage Moog synthesizer with magical, spacetime-altering properties. Jenkins was working on the film with Focus Features, but it never panned out.
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man film
Also in the aftermath of Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins penned a screenplay adaptation, on assignment, of Bill Clegg's 2010 memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.
The Intuitionist film
Years prior to his work on The Underground Railroad, Jenkins had tried to adapt The Intuitionist, the first novel by the same author, Colson Whitehead.
Expatriate film
In January 2018, Jenkins was attached to direct Chadwick Boseman in the thriller film Expatriate, set around a 1970s plane hijacking. Boseman wrote the script with his writing partner Logan Coles. The film remains unrealized as of Boseman's death.
Alvin Ailey biopic
In June 2019, Deadline announced that Jenkins was attached to direct Fox Searchlight's biopic about Alvin Ailey, one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. As of 2024 the film was still in development, and was considered by Jenkins as a possible follow up to Mufasa.
Virunga film
Deadline also reported that Jenkins would team up with Leonardo DiCaprio and Netflix, to write the feature adaptation on the documentary Virunga. The true story follows rangers risking their lives to save Africa's most precious national park and its endangered .
The Knick season 3
In September 2020, Steven Soderbergh confirmed that a new season of The Knick was in development led by Jenkins.
Despite a more intense plot and themes, discussing parenting, friendship, and black masculinity, especially in regards to sexual orientation, Jenkins made the decision to invert Medicine for Melancholy
Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk and The Underground Railroad compose, in the eyes of Jenkins, a thematic trilogy, exploring childhood abandonment – including his own feelings. Moonlight depicts his childhood experience as he lived it whereas If Beale Street Could Talk showcased his, at times, desired family; Whitehead's novel helped him process his feelings of abandonment and he recognized separation of family as a prominent aspect of the story. Jenkins has expressed an inclination to empathize with the characters in his work. Adele Romanski identified Medicine for Melancholy, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk as variations upon a template: a love story. Jenkins noted that Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk are most similar in their visuals.
With Moonlight, Jenkins intertwined "well-known images and stories of contemporary Black life" with queer identity and made the intersectional nature "more legible, not to white audiences but to black communities". Whiteness is diminished in Moonlight, which has been said to defy traditional Hollywood understandings of black masculinity and general black identity, showcasing a spectrum of black sexuality and masculinity. The Underground Railroad similarly breaks away, Jenkins choosing to avoid a portrayal of slaves as solely virtuous – Jenkins having "distinguished" himself from what Gomer dubs "New Black Hollywood". "I hope it can recontextualise rather than reinforce stereotypes about my ancestors, that have been allowed to persist over the decades", Jenkins said.
After The Underground Railroad
| 2008 | Medicine for Melancholy | "Medicine for Melancholy (2008) >Awards" IMDb. | |||
| 2016 | Moonlight | "Moonlight (I) (2016) >Awards" IMDb. | |||
| 2018 | If Beale Street Could Talk | ||||
| 2020 | Charm City Kings | ||||
| 2022 | Aftersun | ||||
| 2023 | All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt | ||||
| 2024 | The Fire Inside | ||||
| 2025 | Sorry, Baby | ||||
| Preparation for the Next Life |
Television
| 2017 | Dear White People | Episode: "Chapter V" | |||||
| 2021 | The Underground Railroad | 10 episodes | |||||
| 2022 | Light & Magic | Appeared in 2 episodes | |||||
| 2024 | True Detective |
|
|
