Julie Ethel Dash (born October 22, 1952) is an American filmmaker, music video and commercial director, author, and website producer.

Maintaining their strong ties to African culture, traditions, and language, the Peazant family ponders the meaning of their planned migration to the U.S.

Dash has written two books on Daughters of the Dust—a "making of" history co-written with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks, and a sequel, set 20 years after the film's story.

Her television movies include Funny Valentines (1999), Incognito (1999), Love Song (2000), and The Rosa Parks Story (2002), starring Angela Bassett.

Continuing her work in television, Dash has directed episodes of several TV series, namely Our Kind of People, Women of the Movement, and Reasonable Doubt, throughout 2021 and 2022.

[4] At the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, it was announced Dash's next major project will be a biopic of civil rights activist Angela Davis, to be produced by Lionsgate.

As of 2017, along with working in television, Dash was named a Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.

[12] As an undergraduate, she studied psychology until she was accepted into the film school at the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts at City Colleges of New York, CCNY.

[13][14] She directed Working Models of Success (1976),[15] and the next year, produced Four Women (1975), a short dance film based on a song by Nina Simone.

Adapted from Alice Walker's short story of the same name, this feature follows a young nun (Barbara O. Jones) in Uganda who is riddled with emptiness and doubt as she ponders her vows and union with Christ.

[23] The graphic simplicity within Diary of an African Nun coupled with Dash's poetic and political style won her a Directors Guild Award for student filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film Exposition.

She wrote and directed the short film Illusions (34 minutes), which explores racial and sexual discrimination in Hollywood and American society.

The film explores Mignon's dilemma, Ester's struggle to get roles as an actress and singer rather than dub for others, and the uses of cinema in wartime: three illusions in conflict with reality.

[26][27] Dash began work on a story in 1975 that was inspired by her father's Gullah family background and immigration from the Sea Islands of Georgia.

The film, set in 1902, revolves around three generations of Gullah women in the Peazant family on St. Helena Island off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.

Innovative with its use of Gullah dialogue and interwoven story-lines among the predominately female cast, the film focuses on ancestral and matriarchal story lines as well as the history of former slaves who settled on the island and formed an independent community there.

[33] Daughters of the Dust premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won a cinematography award.

[34] It became the first feature film by an African-American woman to be distributed in the United States in theatrical release[35] and gained critical praise for its use of dialect and music composed by John Barnes, as well for its cinematography and visual imagery.

[2] Its visuals would influence Beyoncé's 2016 video album Lemonade, featuring young women on the beach, dressed in white gowns as in the movie, and gathering in front of an island cabin.

[37] On its 25th anniversary, the Cohen Media Group restored and distributed Daughters of the Dust for theatrical release, beginning at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.

Rebellion at UCLA produced many prominent filmmakers who were determined to reimagine the media production process while uplifting and sharing authentically black stories.

In the video titled Julie Dash- The Reelback interview on YouTube, she says that her personal filmmaking mission statement is to redefine how we see African-American women on the screen.

Black women take pride in sharing both their talent and their secrets to overcoming racist and sexist obstacles with younger generations.

All of these women wanted to leave the world knowing not only that their craft would live on, but that their children, loved ones, friends, and young Black people in general could take an easier route to discovering their true identity and freedom.

[42] Dash directed the television film Funny Valentines in 1999, an account of a well-to-do black woman's retreat from a troubled New York marriage to the Deep South and her childhood past.

Narrated by Oprah Winfrey, the film features the character of Alice, an escaped slave whose story represents an amalgamation of historic figures.

Dash designed two rooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and VOGUE, In American: An Anthology of Fashion, featured at the NYC Met Gala 2022.

Her other room, the Greek Revival Parlor, Dash highlighted Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy in Orson Well's Time Runs (1950).

The MET Museum describes the impact of the room as, "a narrative blend of reimagined storytelling, archival film images, and a dramatic evocation of historical moments, we dive headfirst into a strange and intimate conversation with the fashions of Madame Eta Hentz, the mythological Muses, and Ms. Eartha Kitt.

[7] Dash still goes to the Sea Islands where they shot Daughters of the Dust; she shared in an interview that she goes there every couple of months because her uncle lives in Charleston and a lot of her family is buried there.