Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye is an African-American lesbian filmmaker who directed The Watermelon Woman (1996), the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian — a landmark work that invented a fictional Black lesbian actress from the 1930s as a way to explore the erasure of Black queer women from film history. Dunye has also directed Stranger Inside (2001), episodes of The L Word, and She Must Be Seeing Things. Her work is at the intersection of race, sexuality, and the politics of representation.