Visiting Filmmakers Series Online: Sacha Jenkins, writer, documentary director

Tuesday, April 28, 2020 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Online Location

Veteran music journalist, filmmaker, and musician Sacha Jenkins has narrated hip-hop poetics for three decades. He was nominated for a 2019 Emmy for his Showtime series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men.

Jenkins spent several years at Vibe magazine, where he served as both staff writer and music editor. In 1994, Jenkins co-founded the music journal ego trip. Jenkins’ unmatched knowledge of New York City’s graffiti culture awarded him a fellowship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in 2000.

Jenkins has built a reputation as a television and film producer, including serving as both a creative consultant and writer on Cartoon Network’s The Boondocks, and as executive producer on VH1’s The White Rapper Show (2007). In 2012, Jenkins joined media company Mass Appeal as chief creative officer. His first feature-length documentary, Fresh Dressed (about hip-hop fashion), premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Jenkins would go on to direct Burn Motherfucker, Burn! (2017) and Word Is Bond (2018), both of which premiered on Showtime

Jenkins served as executive producer on the Netflix series Rapture (2018), an eight-part docuseries on a broad range of artists from T.I. and Rhapsody to Nas and Dave East (he directed the latter episode).

His latest project, Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men—a four-part doc series directed by Jenkins—chronicles 25 years of the seminal group’s career. It premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival before airing on Showtime in May 2019.