Daphne McWilliams
Visiting Faculty, MFA in Film
Profile
Daphne McWilliams began her career in front of the camera as a child actor and behind the camera producing music videos for Blues Traveler, the Notorious B.I.G. and Queen Latifah. In 1995, she produced 4 Little Girls for director Spike Lee. The documentary — about the murder of four African-American girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—was nominated for an Academy Award.
McWilliams has since produced The Curious Case of Curt Flood (Spike Lee, 2011), Slavery by Another Name (Sam Pollard, 2012) and Maynard (Sam Pollard, 2018). Recently, she produced Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (Jeffrey Wolf, 2019) and HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light (Sam Pollard, 2021).
McWilliams’ directorial debut, In a Perfect World …, was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2015 LA Film Festival and premiered on Showtime in 2018. She is currently directing Boston (R)evolution, a documentary about the historical 2022 Boston mayoral election now in post-production.
Daphne, the seventh child of two seventh children, is a native New Yorker. She received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology and was the 2019 Susan Tifft Fellow at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.