Demetria Royals

DEMETRIA ROYALS (Director/Writer/Producer) is an award-winning independent
filmmaker whose work has received support from the Ford Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the
National Black Programming Consortium, the Independent Television Service and
the American Film Institute, among others. Ms. Royals most recently directed
and co-edited the performance/arts documentary, BROTHERMEN (2001, 56:00),
broadcast nationally on PBS (2002) and currently distributed by WQED Video.
She also directed and co-edited the performance/arts feature film
documentary, CONJURE WOMEN (1995, 85:00) that premiered at the 1995 Mill
Valley Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on PBS (1997), currently
distributed by Women Make Movies. Ms. Royals was a 1999 Artist-in-Residence
at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (Anna Deavere Smith, Founding
Director) at Harvard University. She received an additional residency award,
"Artist as Catalyst 2000," from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, as well as
grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund and the
National Endowment for the Arts Multidisciplinary Arts Program, to direct a
collaborative adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s MOTHER COURAGE. She is the
recipient of a Writers Fellowship from the Writers Guild of America as well
as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Video and a writing
development grant from The Funding Exchange Women's Project Scriptwriting
Development Fund for her first dramatic feature. Ms. Royals premiered her
videowall installation on the images of African American women, INVENTING
HERSELF, at the 1993 Mill Valley Film Festival. INVENTING HERSELF has also
been presented by 651 Arts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of an
international arts festival (1995), and at the 2002 National Black Arts
Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Ms. Royals is the Director/Producer of "MAMA'S
PUSHCART: Ellen Stewart and 25 Years of La MaMa E.T.C.," which has won
numerous awards and been presented at film and video festivals around the
world. She is a Director in the Directors Guild of America (member since
1982, qualified in film and videotape). Ms. Royals earned her Masters of Fine
Arts degree from New York University's Graduate Institute of Film and
Television and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Philosophy also
from New York University. She was a recipient of a Kellogg Foundation
National Leadership Fellowship (1994-97) and a Research Fellow at the Studio
for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University as well as Professor of
Media Arts Production at Ramapo College of New Jersey for ten years; she has
also served on numerous arts panels and juries, including the Ars Electronica
in Linz, Austria. She was a 2002 Visiting Research Fellow at the Wesley
Center for New Media at Georgia Institute of Technology in conjunction with a
multi-media commission, REPORT TO THE ANCESTORS, for the National Black Arts
Festival in Atlanta. Ms. Royals is currently the Director of the Film Program
at Sarah Lawrence College. (09/20/02)

Conjure Women
A film by Demetria Royals
Produced by Louise Diamond, 1995, 85 min., Color/BW
CONJURE WOMEN is an exciting performance-based documentary exploring the artistry and philosophy of four African American female artists. Celebrated ...