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Cheryl Dunye was born in Liberia in 1966 but grew up in Philadelphia. She attended Temple University were she received a BA and then went on to complete her MFA at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross school of the Arts. It was there that she first began using the video art form to delve into class, race and sex in the lives of black women. In addition to filmmaking, Dunye is an avid writer, and has published articles for Felix, Time Out and Movement Research. Cheryl Dunye is famous for her pseudo-documentary style of filmmaking, combining fiction and documentary to make what she’s nicknamed the “Dunyementary”. A lot of white feminist film, leans toward discarding usual narrative composition on the whole, but Dunye’s films keep hold of certain usual narrative structures but are laced with different techniques in terms of cinematic language. Her films challenge the received idea of documentary as a non-ideological kind of representation She feels that narrative is as true as we want it to be. We believe in narrative as truth, as document, and we believe in document as fiction. Dunye uses documentary strategies more than narrative strategies because documentary is already fiction, so there's camera structuring the approach to a subject; it puts her in a different space as a maker of media or entertainment. Cheryl Dunye’s work automatically sets her aside as a pioneer because she is a woman in a field dominated by men. It isn’t often that you find female directors/filmmakers and by following her heart and pursuing this career that she so obviously loves, Dunye has set her self up for an uphill battle for respect and recognition in this male orientated world. But, having said that, Dunye is equipped with an insight that male directors do not have, into the women’s role in a film. She can put across a more in depth portrayal of the female character’s psyche, social status, emotional state and relationships with the other characters of the film, in ways the male directors have often not been able to grasp in their work, simply because she is a woman. Her experiences living life as a woman help her to make her female characters on film infinitely more relatable to her viewing audiences. It makes a wonderful change as well to see films solely told from a female perspective. All of Dunye’s films create such a female positive space; they give you an opportunity to see a piece of yourself in all of her characters. Being a female director simply puts a whole new slant on the movie, it allows the viewer to access the storyline from a fresh direction with altered nuances and an atypical emotional overtone. It makes a welcome change from the often-overwhelming masculine ambience of films to date. Cheryl Dunye came onto the indie film and art scene suddenly early in the 90’s with a succession of thought provoking, gritty low budget short films. In Janine, a one woman short film starring Dunye, a director examines her relationship with a white, upper class classmate from high school, and how it effected her self image and also it’s effect on her relationships and sexuality. Greetings from Africa is a comedy that explores the sometimes grey area of lesbian dating, She Don’t Fade is a reflexive look at the life of a black lesbian in the United States and in a setting as lesbian as apple pie is American, Potluck and Passion is set in an actual potluck dinner, where a group of lesbian friends and acquaintances discuss racial, sexual and social politics.
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