She made her feature film directorial debut with the biopic Respect, based on the life of singer Aretha Franklin, starring Jennifer Hudson and released in August 2021.
Tommy was born in Cape Town, South Africa during apartheid and experienced racial segregation as a non-white citizen.
[2] In 1985, when the South African government declared a state of emergency, Tommy's family emigrated to the USA where her father had studied Urban Planning at MIT on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1970s.
Tommy stated that while in high school, she found a common language and purpose through theatre and made that her main focus.
She finds textual analysis and table work important during the rehearsal process and refrains from putting the play on its feet until she knows the actors have a sense of their characters.
She had never seen a production of Les Misérables before she directed it, but she did read the book when she was a young girl and had a mission to tell a story of student uprisings.
[10] Her directing credits include a theatrical version of the animated Disney film Frozen at the Hyperion at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
[14] In March 2018, Tommy was hired to direct Born a Crime, the film adaption of the autobiography of the same name by Trevor Noah.