DuVernay's television credits include the OWN drama series Queen Sugar (2016) and two Netflix drama limited series: When They See Us (2019), based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case and Colin in Black & White (2021), based on the teenage years of NFL player Colin Kaepernick.

[16] DuVernay became disillusioned with journalism, however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies.

[21] Through DVAPR she provided marketing and PR services to the entertainment and lifestyle industry, working on campaigns for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls.

They were mailed a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion program called UBC-TV,[26][27] the African-American blog hub Urban Thought Collective in 2008, Urban Eye, a two-minute long weekday celebrity and entertainment news show distributed to radio stations,[28] and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.

[29] In 2005, over the Christmas holiday, DuVernay decided to take $6,000 and make her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life.

It aired August 28, 2010, on TV One and showcases the U.S.'s largest annual African-American entertainment gathering, the Essence Music Festival.

[34] On Thanksgiving 2010, TV One showed DuVernay's 44-minute documentary special Essence Presents: Faith Through the Storm, about two Black sisters who reclaimed their lives after personal devastation during Hurricane Katrina.

DuVernay stated: "I knew that as a Black woman in this industry, I wouldn't have people knocking down my door to give me money for my projects, so I was happy to make them on the side while working my day job.

In an interview with the LA Times, DuVernay touched on her inspiration for the film, "The idea of looking at the victims of incarceration – the mothers, sisters and daughters -- really came out of knowing women who were going through it.

The 22-minute film stars Lupita Nyong'o, Don Cheadle, Regina King, David Oyelowo, Angela Bassett, Michael Ealy, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, André Holland and Glynn Turman.

Events depicted include William IV's royal assent to the UK Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, the release of Motown's first number-one song, "Please Mr. Postman" by The Marvellettes, Rev.

"[32] He further speaks of DuVernay's mission and "call to action" which constitutes a strategy "to further and foster the Black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining.

"[32] The "DuVernay test" is the racial equivalent of the Bechdel test (for women in movies), as first suggested by Guardian writers Nadia and Leila Latif[42] and then by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in January 2016, asking whether "blacks and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.

[49] The film was sponsored by cosmetic brand Fashion Fair and starred Kali Hawk and Lance Gross with Julie Dash, Victoria Mahoney, Lorraine Toussaint and Issa Rae appearing as extras.

[53] DuVernay in an interview at Indiana University stated that Selma would be "the first major feature film in theaters that has anything to do with King's essential character"[32] making it a historical landmark in the history of biopics.

She made uncredited re-writes of most of the original screenplay by Paul Webb in order to emphasize King and the people of Selma as central figures.

[56] In response to criticism by some historians and media sources who accused her of irresponsibly rewriting history to portray her own agenda, DuVernay said that the film is "not a documentary.

[59] After Selma, DuVernay was approached by executives to direct Marvel's first film about a superhero of color, Black Panther, but she passed.

"[62] In 2015, Apple Music and their ad agency Translation hired DuVernay to helm a series of three commercials starring Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington.

[64] In 2015, DuVernay executive produced and directed the CBS civil rights crime drama pilot For Justice, starring Anika Noni Rose.

[62] That same year, DuVernay announced she would be creating and executive producing the drama series Queen Sugar, based on Natalie Baszile's novel.

The film features several prominent activists, politicians, and public figures, such as Bryan Stevenson, Angela Davis, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michelle Alexander, and others, who discuss such issues as convict leasing, the war on drugs, and disproportionate arrests, convictions and sentencing of minorities.

The critical consensus says: "13th strikes at the heart of America's tangled racial history, offering observations as incendiary as they are calmly controlled.

Following the success of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Disney announced the hiring of Jeff Stockwell to write the screenplay for Cary Granat and his new Bedrock Studios.

Other executive producers credited, include Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Rosenthal and Berry Welsh.

[111] In 2015, it was announced that DuVernay would be writing, producing, and directing a fictional account which will focus on the "social and environmental" aspects of Hurricane Katrina while including a love story and a murder mystery.

"[121] Although she sees building strong business foundations for films is a priority, DuVernay has said that she stresses that the driving force of the organization is activism.

[124] DuVernay, in a keynote address[125] at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival,[126][127] shared that she was the seventh person asked to direct Selma[128] and described her experience at the 2015 Oscars, while being an honor to attend, was just "a room in L.A."[129] In February 2018 it was announced that DuVernay, along with producer Dan Lin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, had launched the Evolve Entertainment Fund.

The fund's mission is to promote inclusion and provide an opportunity for under-served communities to pursue a dream in the entertainment industry.

DuVernay has appeared in wraparounds each Saturday night on the channel, discussing a wide range of films, including Marty, Ashes and Embers, Harlan County, USA and La Pointe Courte.