‘Queen Sugar’: Ava DuVernay Among All-Female Group of Helmers Back to Direct Final Season

When Queen Sugar was first announced in 2016, creator Ava DuVernay revealed a commitment to hiring exclusively female directors. Now, as the OWN family drama preps its seventh and final season, it’s making good on that promise.

The series, from DuVernay’s Array Filmworks, Harpo Films and studio Warner Bros. TV, is currently filming in and around New Orleans with a lineup of seven directors from previous seasons, all of them female. Over the course of seven seasons, the show has employed 42 female directors in all, 39 of them first-time scripted TV directors in the U.S. Per OWN, the initiative has proven a successful pipeline, with every first-time director parlaying the Queen Sugar opportunity into directorial gigs on other shows and films.

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Earlier in Queen Sugar’s run, DuVernay caught wind of a few male members of the Directors Guild of America who allegedly took issue with her decision to focus only on female directors. Her response, which she revealed in a fiery acceptance speech at the 2018 Gloria Awards: “I invite you to tell whoever is feeling discriminated against to sue me so that I can sue every studio that has left women out,” she said at the time, adding of her initiative’s significance: “Why did we do this? Because we can. Because we can create spaces that nourish in our own image, in the same way that our male counterparts have created in their own image for over a century.”

The series finale, part of a season launching this fall, will be helmed by DuVernay herself, just as the pilot episode was six years earlier. The other final season helmers include Kat Candler, Stacey Muhammad, showrunner Shaz Bennett, Patricia Cardoso, Aurora Guerrero and DeMane Davis.

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