Zeinabu Irene Davis is a celebrated director, screenwriter, and professor of Critical Gender Studies and African American Studies at UC San Diego. She is perhaps best known for her films Compensation (1999), A Period Piece (1991), and Cycles(1989), works that center the lives, voices, and imaginations of Black women with a rare tenderness and vision. As part of the legendary L.A. Rebellion—a movement of Black filmmakers who came together at UCLA in the late 1960s through the 1980s—Davis helped define a cinematic practice rooted in community, memory, and resistance to Hollywood’s narrow depictions of Black life. Her work carries forward the rebellion’s ethos while also carving out a distinctive space for Black feminist storytelling that is at once experimental, deeply intimate, and politically urgent. Across film, teaching, and mentorship, she has remained committed to expanding the possibilities of Black visual culture, showing us that cinema can be both a site of healing and a form of resistance.