Barry Jenkins

Barry Jenkins (born November 19, 1979, Miami, Florida, U.S.) is an American director, writer, and producer who is known for creating lyrical, empathetic films that centre on Black characters.

Jenkins grew up in the economically distressed Liberty City neighbourhood of Miami. His father was absent from his life, and his mother struggled with drug addiction. Jenkins was largely raised by a woman who had earlier helped raise his mother. In high school he played football and ran track, and he later earned an academic scholarship to attend Florida State University. Though he enjoyed movies as a child, a career in film did not occur to him, and he studied English and creative writing. During his junior year, almost on a whim, he enrolled in the university’s College of Motion Picture Arts, and he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003.

After graduation Jenkins moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in filmmaking. His early work experience included employment as a production assistant at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios. In hopes of being able to make his own movie, he moved to San Francisco in 2007, where he started writing while working as a shipment supervisor for retailer Banana Republic. Made on a shoestring budget, Medicine for Melancholy (2008) describes 24 hours in a budding romance between two young people in a gentrifying San Francisco. Critics praised it as a sure-footed debut, noting that Jenkins’s film raised issues in a spirit of exploration rather than didacticism.

Jenkins then worked on two projects, one a sci-fi concept around Stevie Wonder and the other based on the 1974 James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk, to which he did not own the rights. Neither panned out. He worked as a carpenter and made a few short films, notably Remigration, a 2011 contribution to the anthology TV series Futurestates. He also cofounded an advertising production company.

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Eventually, a mutual friend gave Jenkins a script for an unproduced play written by Tarell Alvin McCraney. The semi-autobiographical work, entitled In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, was set in the same place and time that Jenkins had grown up in, which appealed to the filmmaker, and he began working on a screenplay. The resulting film, Moonlight (2016), was, as Jenkins described it, a “hood-arthouse coming-of-age LGBT drama” that visits the protagonist at three different points in his life—as a child, as a teen, and as an adult. The hauntingly beautiful and eloquent movie won the Academy Award for best picture. Jenkins and McCraney also won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay, and Jenkins was nominated for the best-director award.

Jenkins next directed a 2017 episode of the TV series Dear White People. Having finally acquired rights to the Baldwin novel, Jenkins made the movie If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), describing a young couple trying to start a life together, though the man is jailed for a rape that he did not commit. This film too won widespread acclaim, and Jenkins’s screenplay earned an Oscar nomination. His next project was the TV miniseries The Underground Railroad (2021), adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enslaved teenager who escapes the Georgia plantation where she lives. In addition to directing, Jenkins also cowrote several episodes.