莉娜·怀特06年
女演员. 作家. 超级巨星.
With a historic Emmy win 和 a Showtime series, Lena Waithe is taking over television.
No one is making huge career moves quite like Television alum 莉娜·怀特06年. At the 2017 Emmy 奖, Waithe became the first African-American woman to win an Emmy for outst和ing writing in a comedy series (无为大师, “Thanksgiving”). Later that year, 从杂志 named Waithe the Out100: 艺术家 of the Year, an honor that celebrates extraordinary LGBTQ+ figures in American society. TIME named her among the 100 most influential people of 2018.
“The things that make us different,” said Waithe at the 2017 Emmys, “those are our superpowers.”
Waithe got her start in television when, at the end of her senior year, she completed Columbia College Chicago’s Semester in LA program, a five-week immersive experience with industry professionals—和 she never left. Waithe stayed in LA to work on major television projects 真实世界 和 骨头, which led to larger film projects such as The Secret Life of Bees 和 臭名昭著的.
All the while, Waithe continued working on her own material. In 2011, she wrote a viral video, “Shit Black Girls Say,” 和 produced the 2014 feature film Dear White People, a satire about “being a black face in a very white place.” The film premiered at Sundance 和 earned the festival’s Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Talent.
And her star continues to rise. In early 2018, hot off her Emmy win for 无为大师, Waithe premiered her semi-autobiographical American drama series, 的气， Showtime节目. The show garnered positive reviews from The New York Times 和 Chicago Tribune. She was also on the big screen as Aech in Stephen Spielberg’s Ready Player One, which premiered in spring 2018.
In 2019, Amazon Studios greenlit two seasons of Waithe’s next project: a horror anthology called 他们, whose first season will be set in 1953 in segregated North Carolina. She has created 和 produced a number of television projects including 回飞棒, 二十多岁, 和 an HBO comedy special for vlogger 和 podcaster Kid Fury.
“People always go ‘Damn, how you got all this happening at once?’”他说 The New York Times 在一次采访中. “I tell them it’s the Chicago in me.”
