Barry Jenkins

Academy Award–winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins is known for his lyrical visual style, emotionally resonant storytelling, and deep, empathetic character work. Whether exploring intimate relationships or historical legacies, Jenkins’s voice is unmistakable – poetic, formally inventive, and rooted in profound human truth.

Jenkins’s breakout film, Moonlight, is widely considered one of the most important works of 21st-century American cinema, ranked No. 5 on The New York Times’ list of the century’s 100 best films. The coming-of-age drama received eight Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor. Jenkins’s screenplay, adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play, earned him an Oscar alongside McCraney and solidified his place as a defining storyteller of his generation. His follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the novel by James Baldwin, was met with critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress (Regina King) and a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins. His debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, a micro-budget meditation on love and gentrification in San Francisco, was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best films of the year and received Independent Spirit and Gotham Award nominations.

On television, Jenkins directed and executive produced The Underground Railroad, an ambitious adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel for Amazon. The limited series was praised for its haunting beauty and emotional depth, earning seven Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Directing for Jenkins, and winning both the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television and Limited Series and the Golden Globe for Best Limited Series.

In 2024, Jenkins made his studio debut with Mufasa: The Lion King, a photo-realistic prequel to Disney’s The Lion King. The film rose to number one at the U.S. box office and maintained a strong theatrical run, becoming a major commercial success and one of the highest-grossing films of the year. He is currently working on several new projects, including The Natural Order, a sci-fi thriller for Universal Pictures starring Glen Powell, and Be My Baby, an A24 biopic starring Zendaya as Ronnie Spector.

Jenkins continues to build on his remarkable body of work with a singular and transformative voice. His unwavering commitment to exploring the depths of human experience drives each project, as he pushes the boundaries of form and narrative, always remaining grounded in empathy, beauty and truth.