“Mississippi Damned” writer-director Tina Mabry is the 2017 recipient of Outfest’s Fusion Achievement Award, a press release has announced. The filmmaker will receive the honor at the Fusion Gala, held during the upcoming Outfest Fusion LGBT People of Color Film Festival. The ceremony will take place March 4, and the fest runs from March 1–7.
Mabry made her feature directorial debut with 2009’s “Mississippi Damned,” based partly on her own experiences growing up. The rural Mississippi-set drama follows three poor black kids who struggle to escape their hometown and their family’s cycle of abuse and addiction.
She followed up the film with TV work, serving as producer, writer, and director of OWN’s family drama “Queen Sugar,” created by “Selma” helmer Ava DuVernay. Mabry also produced and directed An American Girl special for Amazon Kids, “Melody 1963: Love Has To Win,” a portrait of a 10-year-old black girl’s evolving perception of race and racism in the United States during the civil rights movement. She won a DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Children’s Programming as well as a NAACP Award for the project. The “Itty Bitty Titty Committee” co-writer will direct two episodes of Netflix’s upcoming comedy series “Dear White People.”
“Elated, excited, amped — words can’t even describe how I feel about where we’re headed as LGBT filmmakers of color,” Mabry has said.
“Tina’s first short film ‘The Slowdown’ debuted at the inaugural Outfest Fusion festival in 2004, and shortly thereafter, her first feature, ‘Mississippi Damned,’ took home our Audience Award at Outfest Los Angeles. Since then she has time and time again shown she can channel deeply personal stories into masterful award-winning art,” said Christopher Racster, Executive Director of Outfest. “Tina continues to produce, write, and direct fresh, relatable, inclusive work in a time when we still struggle to see diverse representations in film and television. It is incredibly meaningful to watch as her talent gains wider and wider recognition and to come full circle at Outfest Fusion and honor her for her achievements.”
“When I was growing up I used writing as a means to escape some of the adult issues I had to deal with as a child. As a kid I didn’t have any control over what was happening in my life, but when I would write, I got that control by manipulating situations to go the way I wanted them to,” Mabry has revealed. “If it weren’t for the hard situations I grew up experiencing, I wouldn’t be a writer. I think of my past as a blessing disguised as a burden.”
Previous winners of Outfest’s Fusion Achievement Award include writer-directors Rose Troche (“The Safety of Objects,” “The L Word”) and Nisha Ganatra (“Transparent”), and actress Sandra Oh (“Grey’s Anatomy”).
