Celebrating Black History Month | Yoruba Richen
“Reframing the Narrative One Story at a Time.”
- Yoruba Richen
This week, we continue our Black History Month series, where we are highlighting Black LGBTQ+ individuals from current and recent history who continue to inspire us as LGBTQ+ Christians. Taking a look at how we as people of faith can continue to learn from their stories, passions, and work as we learn new ways to be in community with and for one another even in the midst of challenging times.
Today, we're celebrating and highlighting Yoruba Richen. Yoruba is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She has been producing, directing, and writing films since 2001, covering topics surrounding the Black experience—illuminating issues of race, space, and power.
We invite you to continue reading to learn more about Yoruba Richen!
Yoruba Richen was born in 1972 in New York City and grew up in Harlem in the beginning of her life. However, she went to school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This commute illuminated the differences between the neighborhoods: one was Black, working-class, and voiceless, while the other was white, wealthy, and powerful. This experience shaped her life and led her to look at how power plays out among race dynamics and how the poor are often forced to compete for limited resources.
She went on to study political science and theater at Brown University and then went on to earn a master’s degree in city planning at UC Berkeley. After her schooling, Yoruba made the decision to become a documentary filmmaker, which was her way of combining her passion for social justice and engaging audiences through storytelling.
After working on several documentaries for HBO, BET, and A&E, she took a job as a producer for the investigative unit for ABC News. Later on, Yoruba received an international journalism fellowship, which launched her work on her documentary, Promised Land. Promised Land follows two Black communities in South Africa that are attempting to recover land that white settlers took from their ancestors during apartheid.
In 2014, Yoruba gave a TED Talk entitled “What the Gay Rights Movement Learned from the Civil Rights Movement.”. This talk takes a look at the intersection of being Black and a member of the LGBTQ+ communities.
In an interview with Yoruba, she tells the interviewer that she is not religious. However, she thought that the perspective of the Black church was important to understand because of how the Black church had a role in the Civil Rights Movement. So she sought to tell the story of the intersectionality of gay rights and the influence of the Black Church in her documentary The New Black.
Since The New Black, Yoruba has worked on documentaries such as Out in the Night, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, The Sit-In, The Killing of Breonna Taylor, How it Feels To Be Free, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and so much more. Yoruba does not call herself an activist but a filmmaker. However, it is clear that she has used her passion for filmmaking to tell stories that others seem to overlook and to keep Black history and the issues that affect Black communities alive.
Today, we are honored to highlight Yoruba Richen, and in highlighting her, we hope you can find the spaces in which you can use your passions and talents to bring others’ voices out of the shadows and into the light. We are thankful for Yoruba Richen’s work and contributions to the LGBTQ+ community and celebrate all of who she is!
