[4] Chenzira was exposed to art from a young age, including dance lessons, opera and theatre visits as a child.

[6] Chenzira is the Division Chair of the Arts at Spelman College and one of the first African Americans to teach film production in higher education.

She was a founding board member of Production Partners in New York, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the visibility of African-American as well as Hispanic and Latino American films.

In 2001, Chenzira was invited to serve as the first William and Camille Cosby Endowed Professor in the Arts at Spelman College in Atlanta.

[4] There, she created and directed the award-winning Digital Moving Image Salon (DMIS), a year-long research and documentary production course.

[11] The pioneering short animated film tackles matters of space and personal rights for Black women and their bodies.

[12] The award-winning ten-minute, 16-mm color animation contrasts the hair experiences and culture of Black women against white beauty standards.

[13][14] Chenzira produced and directed Alma's Rainbow in 1993, a "coming-of-age" comedy-drama about middle-class black women in Brooklyn.

[16] Though assumptions were made about the film on the "palette of the movie’s mise en scene", "bubble gum dialogue" and "splashy costumes", the subject matter had intellectual weight in its deconstruction of roles based on race, class, and gender.

[16] Chenzira dismantles the sexist, capitalist modes of patriarchy that negatively affect women's self-images within the working world; a struggle Black women face in "how to deprogram the ideological brainwashing they have received from the capitalist system without sacrificing the spiritual and economic success that such a system allows them access to through its lines of power.

In 2018, Chenzira received a call from Ava DuVernay inviting her to direct an episode in season 3 of Queen Sugar (Here Beside the River).

Since then, she has directed the season 4 finale of Queen Sugar, and episodes of Greenleaf, Trinkets, Delilah, Dynasty, A League of Their Own, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Beacon 23.

Black Women Animate and the Cartoon Network honored Ayoka Chenzira in 2020 with the Cultural Innovator Award.

Many of Chenzira's films today are in permanent collections including MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and some have been translated into French and Japanese.

Chenzira won the 1991 Sony Innovator Award, and has been honored for her contributions to Black cinema by the mayors of New York City and Detroit.