Barry Jenkins

Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins’ feature film debut, Medicine for Melancholy, was hailed as one of the best films of 2009 by The New York Times and received several Independent Spirit and Gotham Award nominations. In 2017, along with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his second feature, the Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning Best Picture Moonlight. His third feature, the adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, went on to receive three Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Jenkins’s most recent feature is Walt Disney Studio’s MUFASA: The Lion King which went on to become the 6th biggest release of 2024, with over $700M in the global box office. Jenkins will next direct Zendaya in A24’s Ronnie Spector biopic. He is also set to co-write and direct Glen Powell in The Natural Order. Other upcoming work includes a biopic of famed choreographer Alvin Ailey for Searchlight Pictures.

As a producer, Jenkins and his PASTEL production shingle produced Aftersun from BAFTA-winning Scottish filmmaker, Charlotte Wells, as well as Eva Victor’s debut feature Sorry, Baby. 

For television, Jenkins was showrunner and co-wrote and directed all ten episodes of the critically acclaimed adaptation series of Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award winning novel, The Underground Railroad. The show won the BAFTA for Best International Series and a Golden Globe for Best Limited

Series/Anthology/Motion Picture Made for Television and garnered seven Primetime EMMY nominations, a PGA nomination and WGA nomination, while Jenkins won the DGA for Best Director for a TV Movie/Limited Series. Jenkins executive-produced HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster and written and directed by Issa Lopez, which received 19 EMMY nominations. He also directed an episode in the first season of the Netflix Original Series Dear White People.