Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Prince-Bythewood, 0 open letters

About Gina Prince-Bythewood
Gina Prince-Bythewood (born Gina Maria Prince on June 10, 1969) is an American film director and writer. Her primary credits as a director include the films Disappearing Acts and Love & Basketball, produced by Spike Lee and starring Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan, which won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.
At 7 years of age, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s family television broke, and they didn’t get another one for 8 years. It was during this time that she fell in love with books and would read 20 a week. Bythewood would go on to become one of the few African-American female directors and even fewer African-American female directors to have a film distributed by Hollywood. Bythewood attended UCLA’s film school, where she also ran competitive track. At UCLA, she received the Gene Reynolds Scholarship for Directing and the Ray Stark Memorial Scholarship for Outstanding Undergraduates. She graduated in 1991. Along with her friends Mara Brock Akil, Sara Finney Johnson and Felicia Henderson (also a UCLA graduate), she endows The Four Sisters Scholarship. It was at UCLA that she discovered her love for directing. “I was working on a crew carrying lighting equipment when it clicked how happy I was being on set, “she said in an interview with Time magazine (Corliss). Soon after graduating from UCLA, she was hired as a writer for “The Cosby Show”-spinoff “A Different World”. She also has written for the television shows “Felicity”, “South Central”, “Courthouse” and “Sweet Justice”. Her television directorial debut was the 1995 CBS Schoolbreak Special “What About Your Friends”. It won her a NAACP Image Award for Best Children’s Special and two Emmy nominations for writing and directing. Bythewood got help from Bill Cosby, the NAACP and Robert Redford to finance Love and Basketball, her first feature film along with Fox Searchlight. The movie was distributed to theaters in 2000. After Love and Basketball, she directed an adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel Disappearing Acts, also released in 2000. She produced her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood’s film Biker Boyz. They have two sons- Cassius and Toussaint. “She is a black woman who has accomplished what many white men with more clout and experience have long attempted: a chic flick that crosses over. Love and Basketball not only crosses over the race barrier. It appeals to the fierce determination we all have to reach goals set by our hearts, even at the risk of losing love,” Nancy Rosenblum described Bythewood and her film Love and Basketball.

Most recently, she directed "The Secret Life of Bees" which she adapted from the best-selling book by Sue Monk Kidd. It was released by Fox Searchlight in October of 2008, and debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and Urbanworld Film Festival that same year.
Her husband is Reggie Rock Bythewood, also a film director and writer.

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