Kasi Lemmons Biography

Kasi Lemmons is an American film director and actress, most notable for her work on the films Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine and Talk to Me. She is described as film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon and as “an ongoing testament to the creative possibilities of the film”.

Kasi Lemmons Age

Kasi Lemmons was born on February 24, 1961, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. She was born and raised in the United States. She is 58 years old as of 2019.

Kasi Lemmons Net worth

Kasi Lemmons earns her income from her businesses and from other related organizations. She also earns her income from her work as a film director and actress. She has an estimated net worth of $ 2 million dollars as of 2019.

Kasi Lemmons Education

Kasi Lemmons attended several universities like Commonwealth School, New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kasi Lemmons Wife

Kasi Lemmons has been married to actor and director Vondie Curtis-Hall since 1995. The couple was blessed with four children. Kasi describes her husband is immensely supportive and feels that he is more relaxed than she is. Compared to how he works, she prefers the pressure of working on a set with the actors.

Kasi Lemmons Acting Career

In 1979, Kasi Lemmons made her acting debut in the television movie 11th Victim (1979).

She performed with the Boston Children’s Theater and later attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts but transferred to UCLA to major in history.

She eventually left UCLA and enrolled in the film program at the New School for Social Research. As a young child, she got her first role on TV on a local soap opera called You Got a Right, a courtroom drama.

She played the first and only black girl who integrated to an all-white school. Her acting credits include episodic parts on shows like As the World Turns, Murder, She Wrote, The Cosby Show or ER and films such as Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988),

Vampire’s Kiss (1988), the Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), Hard Target (1993), Fear of a Black Hat (1993), Gridlock’d (1997) and ‘Til There Was You (1997).

Kasi Lemmons Filmmaking

In 1997, she directed the film Eve’s Bayou starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Diahann Carroll, and Jurnee Smollett. As a director and a mother, Lemmons says that it gives her perspective. Her life outside of the movie set and Hollywood has kept her grounded.

Though she is a black woman, who identifies the primarily as an artist: “I don’t wake up every day saying I’m a black woman because it’s too given, but I wake up every day feeling like an artist and I feel I’m an artist”.

The film was well-received among critics (currently holding an 80% rate of approval on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes) and won Lemmons an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature as well as a National Board of Review award for Outstanding Directorial Debut.

In 2001 she directed Jackson again in The Caveman’s Valentine about a schizophrenic homeless man trying to solve a murder mystery. In 2002 Lemmons conceived and helmed the tribute to Sidney Poitier for the 74th Annual Academy Award show.

Shortly afterward there was an announcement that Lemmons would direct The Battle of Cloverfield, a supernatural thriller, from her own script for Columbia Pictures. In 2007, she directed Talk to Me (2007) about an ex-con (played by Don Cheadle) who became a popular talk show host and community activist.

She specifically wanted Don Cheadle in her movie. She felt Martin Sheen would be fitting to play E.G. Sonderling, head of the radio station. The film and the actors were praised and Lemmons received an Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture.

She adapted the Broadway musical Black Nativity and filmed it in 2013. It starred Academy Award winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson, as well as Academy Award nominee Angela Bassett.

She is also attached to the direct Apartheid-set drama Agaat, based on Marlene van Niekerk’s novel, in addition to an adaptation of Zadie Smith’s best-selling novel On Beauty.

Lemmons explained during an interview that she considered writing to be central to her task as a director: I’ve been writing scripts all the time, pretty much every day for fourteen years… I have to write scripts because that’s the only way I can write parts that will get a lot of people whom I really want to work with involved.

Kasi Lemmons Movies

• Eve’s Bayou 1997
• Black Nativity 2013
• The Caveman’s Valentine 2001
• The Silence of the Lambs 1991
• Talk to Me 2007
• Candyman 1992
• Harriet 2019
• Hard Target 1993
• Social Genocide 2004
• Override 1994
• Disconnect 2012
• Sisters In Cinema 2003
• Drop Squad 1994
• Waist Deep 2006
• Gridlock’d 1997
• Vampire’s Kiss 1988
• School Daze 1988
• Fear of a Black Hat 1993

Kasi Lemmons Tv Shows

• UnderCover
  1991
• Another World
  1964 – 1999

Kasi Lemmons Buried Hollywood Treasure

She said she wanted to find an obscure director in Hollywood that I could grow and learn from during this academic endeavor, gaining an understanding of what it is to become a great director.

In my class, many students opted to use such subjects as Hitchcock, Spielberg, Fellini, and Scorsese who are practically clichés in the film community. I scoff at film students studying these renowned content creators whose body of work is etched in every issue of Variety magazine and plastered on the walls of old movie theaters everywhere.

It screams to me that you’re not even trying when you elect to choose a filmmaker to write a project about who is such a significant part of pop culture, that they are also featured as a ride in Universal Studios.

I’m a film prude, I’m sorry. There are so many obscure directors that deserve more notoriety. I preface the statement above to clue you in on a filmmaker that I spent several months reading, learning, developing, and nurturing into my work as a budding filmmaker.

I took on the task of going with an unknown director compared to the choices among my colleagues.  However, she wasn’t so much of an unknown at the time for Black women like me who respected and appreciated the beauty of the 1997 film, Eve’s Bayou.

I know Eve’s Bayou is not a horror film, but Eve’s Bayou was my gateway into really trying to capture the essence of who and what Kasi Lemmons brings to the big screen as a director who has an eye for gorgeous cinematography and a keen sense for talent.

The enthralling performances of Jurnee Smollett, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, and Meagan Good was refreshing for a 17-year-old Black girl with big dreams of making her own films one day.

My project was simple: I had to write a paper on what inspires me to create film art. I won’t go into depth about the paper itself, but I will expand a little more on who and what Kasi has done for Black cinema as well as Black women in horror.

Kasi Lemmons, a native of St. Louis, Missouri began her career as an actress on the small screen. Kasi has been married for 17 years to actor/director Vonde Curtis-Hall. She made several appearances on various television shows and movies.

Her first major role in a feature film was the classic horror film Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Kasi played Ardelia Mapp, a trainee at the FBI academy who announces to Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) that the infamous serial killer she had been seeing regularly for clues to close a national murder case, Dr.

Hannibal Lecter hijacked an ambulance and drove to a nearby airport to flee the country. In Ardelia’s last scene, we see her smile and wink at Clarice as she graduates from the Academy and earns her badge.

The next memorable horror film Kasi appeared in was the 1992 cult classic Candyman. If you say his name five times under your breath it may just be your last. Kasi starred as Bernie Walsh, the confidant colleague to Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). The overly inquisitive Lyle goes on a monster hunt along with Bernie who is cautious and a bit skeptic over the Candyman urban legend.

Kasi’s fair share of horror didn’t stop there. In 2001, she reunited with Eve’s Bayou star Samuel L. Jackson in the poetic and hauntingly torrid tale about a cave-dwelling man called The Caveman’s Valentine. The film is not the kind of status quo horror that many of us are accustomed to, however, it is a nuanced brand of horror that falls in alignment with being more of a psychological thriller.

Every frame in the film looks like an oil painting with beautiful hues and colors lit brightly shot for shot.  The performances that stand out the most in this crime drama are from Tamara Tunie and Ann Magnuson who dominate the screen. The film is based on the George Dawes Green novel of the same name.

Kasi is one of those beautiful talents from Hollywood that somehow has stayed in the fringes of oblivion. Her last film Black Nativity, based on a Langston Hughes play was released on November 27, 2013, by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Her work in this industry has been steady, but with longer breaks in between than what most of her male director counterparts face.

There are only a handful of black female directors in Hollywood. There are even fewer who have the talent and skill of women like Lemmons. In Eve’s Bayou, she demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of Black women in such a three-dimensional way without conforming to stereotypes or overused tropes.

In Caveman’s Valentine, Lemmons took a deeply intricate story from a previously published novel and constructed art and the power of storytelling on the big screen in a profound way. She challenges the performances of her actresses, desiring for them to command the screen and to reinforce that women characters can have bountiful depth and meaning.

I would love to see more of Kasi’s work on screen in the horror genre, as either a filmmaker or an actress. She is a talented force to be reckoned with and for any woman of color who is in the film industry or a fan of horror, you should get to know and appreciate the greatness that is Kasi Lemmons.

Kasi Lemmons Quotes

I don’t over-think my existence. I’m a very imperfect person, like most of us are. I’m also a very busy person. I have a family. I have a career. I’m a professor at NYU. I have a full life for which I feel grateful every day.

The biggest challenges are always getting into the rooms that you need to get into and having people open to the types of stories that I want to tell. And I feel that just being a female director and doing that is a big deal in this country. On my third movie, I worked with a French DP. I asked him has he ever worked with a woman director before? He said in France a third of directors are women; so you can’t avoid them. So I realized that the US is behind.

One of my foolish qualities is to jump boldly, and then think about it later.

Perseverance is what I tell my students. It’s important that you keep your dream alive, because you’re going to encounter a lot of obstacles, and no one is going to dream big for you. You have to have the fortitude and the resilience to stick with your own dreams. That can be hard.

Honestly, I do spend most of my time between films trying to get the next one made.

If I like a film, I usually appreciate the way it was made the first time.

I think Black Nativity movie has a very clear message. It’s about a family in crisis facing some of the very familiar struggles we face in our communities. It’s really about love, redemption, forgiveness, faith, and family, the things that have gotten us through so many hard times, and that continue to get us through them. When times are hard, we need each other.

I wanted to pay homage to someone who was such an important literary figure in my life. I think Langston Hughes would be proud of the picture Black Nativity, yet it’s a contemporary story about a family living in Harlem. I named the lead character Langston, put a little bit of poetry in there, and some Langston Hughes quotes, and, of course, his stage play, Black Nativity.

I’ve come to really believe that I have something to offer as a filmmaker, that goes beyond what I had to offer as an actress and maybe this is what I’m meant to do.

I encountered Newton when I was growing up, and it has kind of made me who I am, although I came to love Boston. It’s a complicated city. Some of the smartest people in the world are in Boston. How many institutions of higher learning are in that one area? It’s a pool of intelligence. It’s a great town. You can encounter racism anywhere. I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about Boston. It was a cool place to grow up.

Black Nativity certainly lends itself to reinterpretation. It was kind of designed to be infused with the creativity of whoever is putting it on, and every performance is a little bit different. So, this is definitely my version of Black Nativity. It has its own story, which is a family story. Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity informs it and is contained within it.

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