Daphne McWilliams
Visiting Faculty, MFA in Film
Profile
Daphne McWilliams began her career both in front of the camera as a child actor and had a featured role in THE WIZ, staring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. and behind it, producing music videos for artists such as Blues Traveler, the Notorious B.I.G., and Queen Latifah. In 1995, she produced the documentary 4 Little Girls for director Spike Lee. The film, which chronicles the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of four African-American girls, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Since then, McWilliams has produced The Curious Case of Curt Flood (Spike Lee, 2011), Slavery by Another Name (Sam Pollard, 2012), and Maynard (Sam Pollard, 2018). More recently, she produced Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (Jeffrey Wolf, 2019) and HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light (Sam Pollard, 2021). McWilliams made her directorial debut with In a Perfect World…, which was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2015 LA Film Festival and premiered on Showtime in 2018. Her most recent project, A Boston (R)evolution, a documentary on the historic 2021 Boston mayoral election, premiered on PBS on August 13, 2024. A native New Yorker, McWilliams is the seventh child of two seventh children.
She earned her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology and was named the 2019 Susan Tifft Fellow at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Her latest film, “Boston (R)evolution,” a documentary focusing on the 2021 Boston mayoral election, premiered on PBS.org on August 13th, 2024.