Biography

Demetria Royals is an award winning Director/Writer/Producer and Educator. She is an acclaimed independent filmmaker, adept at designing filmmaking curriculum using digital, New Media and other emerging/cutting-edge artistic disciplines. Demetria is a critical thinker, collaborator and strategic thought partner whose work has received support from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Black Programming Consortium, the Independent Television Service and the American Film Institute, among others. Ms. Royals directed and co-edited the performance/arts documentary, BROTHERMEN (2001, 56:00), broadcast nationally on PBS (2002) and currently distributed by WQED Video. She also directed and co-edited the performance/arts feature film documentary, CONJURE WOMEN (1995, 85:00) that premiered at the 1995 Mill Valley Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on PBS (1997), currently distributed by Women Make Movies. Ms. Royals was a 1999 Artist-in-Residence at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (Anna Deavere Smith, Founding Director) at Harvard University. She received an additional residency award, “Artist as Catalyst 2000," from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts Multidisciplinary Arts Program, to direct a collaborative adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s MOTHER COURAGE. Demetria is the recipient of a Writers Fellowship from the Writers Guild of America as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Video and a writing development grant from The Funding Exchange Women's Project Scriptwriting Development Fund for her first dramatic feature. Ms. Royals premiered her video wall installation on the images of African American women, INVENTING HERSELF, at the 1993 Mill Valley Film Festival. INVENTING HERSELF has also been presented by 651 Arts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of an international arts festival (1995), and at the 2002 National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Ms. Royals is the Director/Producer of "MAMA’S PUSHCART: Ellen Stewart and 25 Years of La MaMa E.T.C.," which has won numerous awards and been presented at film and video festivals around the world. She is a Director in the Directors Guild of America (member since 1982, qualified in film and videotape). Demetria Royals earned her Masters of Fine Arts degree from New York University's Graduate Institute of Film and Television and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Philosophy also from New York University. She was a recipient of a Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellowship (1994-97) and a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University as well as Professor of Media Arts Production at Ramapo College of New Jersey for ten years.She served on numerous arts panels and juries, including the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Ms. Royals was a 2002 Visiting Research Fellow at the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Institute of Technology in conjunction with a multi-media commission, REPORT TO THE ANCESTORS, for the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. Since 2001, she has been a professor and director of the Film Program at Sarah Lawrence College.