theblackbottom

Tanya Hamilton has received writing grants from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts Grant, Five-County Arts Grant of the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. For her short film, The Killers, Hamilton won the Best Short Film prize at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival, the 1997 New Line Cinema award, and the Director’s Guild of America Award for best female director. She also producing her debut feature, “Stringbean& Marcus,” starring Mos Def, Sophie Okonedo, John Legend, and Snoop Dogg. Developed at the Sundance Institute’s Filmmaking and Writing Labs, Stringbean & Marcus received production grants from the Minnesota Film Fund and the Producers Club of Maryland. Hamilton, a native of Philadelphia, is a graduate of Columbia University’s Division of Film and Cooper Union School of Art. Ms. Hamilton currently has a new entry in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival “Night Catches Us.” The film’s synopsis is “In 1978, complex political and emotional forces are set in motion when a young man returns to the race-torn Philadelphia neighborhood where he came of age during the Black Power movement. Cast: Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Jamie Hector, Wendell Pierce, Jamara Griffin. We wish Ms. Hamilton well. We hope she is as Lee Daniels’s “Precious,” which was in the Sundance competition last year year. We hope Tyler and Oprah team up together for her too.