Award winning writer/director Shari Lynette Carpenter made her episodic television directing debut as part of Ava DuVernay’s groundbreaking all female directing staff on season six of OWN’s Queen Sugar. Her first Lifetime movie, Single Black Female, starring Amber Riley and Raven Goodwin, was their highest viewed non holiday movie in 2022. Following that, she directed Mary J. Blige’s Strength of a Woman and Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge. Her short fiction film, Keepers of the Flame, an exploration of racism within the first women’s suffragette march in 1913, is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit.
Other recent projects of Carpenter’s include the short docuseries #WhyWeCount Census 2020 Campaign and her film, Three’s Complicated, a romantic comedy that she both wrote and directed starring Shanola Hampton (Found) and Tyler Lepley (Harlem, P. Valley).
Carpenter says she came out of the womb with pencil in hand, a born storyteller and her film career all began with a fan letter written to the, then up and coming and now, legendary filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee gave Carpenter her first jobs in film and she eventually worked by his side as his script supervisor. Script supervision afforded Carpenter the opportunity to work with A list directors, producers, and actors including Denzel Washington, Robert DeNiro, Forest Whitaker and Kerry Washington, among others.
Carpenter wrote and directed the award winning short film Since Lisa (Winner at the Black Filmmaker Hall of Fame and Black American Cinema Society Festivals), which screened at more than two dozen film festivals, as well as several other shorts. Her feature directorial debut, Kali’s Vibe, a national and international festival favorite, garnered Jury, Audience and Vision awards. Carpenter’s PSA for Proctor and Gamble’s ‘My Black is Beautiful’ campaign was specially created to air during BET’s Black Girls Rock awards and to inspire and empower adolescent black girls.
An NYU graduate, Carpenter is currently part of the Paramount Global Directing Initiative and the Directors Guild of America’s Television Mentorship Program. She was a member of the DGA Women’s Steering Committee Squad and is currently the Director category rep for the DGA’s Eastern Diversity Steering Committee. She is an alum of the 2023 The Writers Lab (TWL). She is a Rockefeller grant nominee, a Gordon Parks Award nominee, a Sundance Writer’s Lab finalist, a Stowe Story Lab Board member and alumna, an ABC Writer Development Fellow, an ABC Daytime Directing Apprentice and an IFP Project Involve: NY Fellow.
She has written articles for Creative Screenwriting, Filmmaker, Cineaste and Essence magazines and is a mentor for The National YoungArts Foundation, an organization that identifies and nurtures the most accomplished young artists in the visual, literary, design and performing arts and assists them at critical junctures in their educational and professional development.