Kasi Lemmons

Kasi Lemmons ( ; born Karen Lemmons, February 24, 1961) is an American film director, screenwriter, and actress.She began her career with roles in commercials with McDonald's and Levis, then she moved to the small screen with shows such as 11th Victim (1979) and then moved to the big screen in Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), followed by the comedy Vampire's Kiss (1989), before being cast as Ardelia Mapp in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). She subsequently co-starred with Virginia Madsen in the horror film Candyman (1992).Lemmons made her directorial debut with 1997's Eve's Bayou, followed by Dr. Hugo (1998), The Caveman's Valentine (2001), Talk to Me (2007), Black Nativity (2013), and her highest-grossing film, 2019's Harriet, about abolitionist Harriet Tubman. She was described by film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon as "an ongoing testament to the creative possibilities of film."Lemmons adapted the novel Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow into an opera libretto for the composer Terence Blanchard. It was premiered by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on June 15, 2019, and opened the 2021-2022 Metropolitan Opera season, becoming that institution's first opera by an African-American composer.