• Yvonne Michelle Shirley
• Director
• Community Media Center, Express Newark

Yvonne Shirley is a director and producer of narrative and documentary films. She has an MFA in film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is inspired by filmmaking in the social realist tradition. Her short film, Flowers, won Best Short Film in the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2016 American Black Film Festival. She produced the award-winning documentary short, Black 14, directed by Darius Clark Monroe and executive produced by Spike Lee. She is producing a feature-length documentary on the artist Gil Scott-Heron, directed by celebrated documentarian, Orlando Bagwell (Eyes on the Prize, Malcolm X: Make It Plain). Currently, she is directing the documentary, “Story of A Rape Survivor: A Movement of Healing” as well as collaborating with local artists to develop The Newarkive, a multimedia artistic archive, centering imagery of and by Newark’s African American communities. She is also a proud member of the New Negress Film Society, a New York-based Black Women’s film collective.