Ava DuVernay

Ava DuVernay (born 1972) moved from film publicist to filmmaker and became one of the most consequential directors of her generation: Selma (2014), the Oscar-nominated mass-incarceration documentary 13th (2016), Netflix’s When They See Us (2019), and Origin (2023). With A Wrinkle in Time she became the first Black woman to direct a live-action film with a budget over $100 million, and her collective ARRAY has spent more than a decade distributing films by women and filmmakers of color that the studio system passed over.

Holding the copyright line

In March 2025, DuVernay was among the most prominently named signatories — headlines paired her with Paul McCartney, Cate Blanchett, and Lilly Wachowski — of the open letter from 400-plus creatives to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The letter responded to OpenAI and Google submissions to the administration’s AI Action Plan that argued training on copyrighted work should not require permission. The signatories countered that the companies, with their “substantial revenues and available funds,” should simply negotiate licenses, and that weakening copyright would undermine an arts economy supporting over 2.3 million American jobs.

The stance fits a career spent arguing about who controls the pipes. DuVernay built ARRAY precisely because, as she has often said, traditional gatekeeping models were collapsing and artists needed “new ways to work without permission” — institutional permission, that is. On AI training, her position lands on the other side of the same coin: the artists’ work itself is not free raw material.