Elizabeth Alice Broderick is an American actress. She portrayed Zelda Spellman in the ABC/WB television sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003). She also had recurring roles as Diane Janssen in the ABC mystery drama series Lost (2005–2008) and as Rose Twitchell in the CBS science fiction drama series Under the Dome (2013).
The women in prison film is a subgenre of exploitation film that began in the early 20th century and continues to the present day.
Shannon Leigh Boxx Spearman is an American retired soccer player and former member of the United States women's national soccer team, playing the defensive midfielder position. She last played club soccer for the Chicago Red Stars in the American National Women's Soccer League. She won gold medals with the United States at the 2004 Athens Olympics, 2008 Beijing Olympics, and 2012 London Olympics. She has also finished third place or better with the US at the 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2015 FIFA Women's World Cups. She was a finalist for the 2005 FIFA World Player of the Year award, and won an NCAA Women's Soccer Championship with Notre Dame in 1995. Shannon Boxx announced her retirement from international and club soccer after winning the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. She played her last game on October 21, 2015, when the USWNT tied with Brazil as part of their victory tour.
Angela Robinson is an American film and television director, screenwriter and producer. Outfest Fusion LGBTQ People of Color Film Festival awarded Robinson with the Fusion Achievement Award in 2013 for her contribution to LGBTQ+ media visibility.
South High School is a public high school in Torrance, California. It is one of five high schools in the Torrance Unified School District.
Faith Nolan is a Canadian social activist, folk and jazz singer-songwriter and guitarist of mixed African, Mi'kmaq, and Irish heritage. She currently resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Manijeh Hekmat is an Iranian film director. She has worked since 1980 as an assistant director and production designer in over 25 films. She directed her first feature film Women's Prison in 2002. This film has been shown at over 80 international film festivals and has received seven prizes. Three Women is Hekmat's second feature film made in 2007. Hekmat has produced five noted films which include the award-winning feature films The Girl in the Sneakers and A Bunch of Grass, the latter a German-produced film made in the Iranian Kurdistan. In her 2018 movie, The Old Road, Hekmat addressed the social problem of violence against women.
Stranger Inside is a made-for-television crime drama film directed by Cheryl Dunye that premiered on cable television in 2001. The story primarily concerns African-American lesbians in prison. Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M., helped to produce it. In a 2004 issue of Feminist Studies, Dunye stated that she worked with actual female inmates to produce the script.
Lesbian portrayal in media is generally in relation to feminism, love and sexual relationships, marriage and parenting. Some writers have stated that lesbians have often been depicted as exploitative and unjustified plot devices. Common representations of lesbians in the media include butch or femme lesbians and lesbian parents. "Butch" lesbian comes from the idea of a lesbian expressing themselves as masculine by dressing masculine, behaving masculinely, or liking things that are deemed masculine, while "femme" lesbian comes from the idea of a lesbian expressing themselves as feminine by dressing feminine, behaving femininely, or liking things that are deemed feminine.
Chained Heat is a 1983 American-German exploitation film in the women-in-prison genre. It was co-written and directed by Paul Nicholas for Jensen Farley Pictures. Producer was Paul Fine, who had previously produced The Concrete Jungle.
Caged Fury is a 1990 women-in-prison film about a group of prisoners who decide to escape from an all-female prison. The film was directed by Bill Milling, and stars Erik Estrada, Richard Barathy and James Hong.
Janet Baus is an American documentary film and television director, producer and editor. In 1993, she co-directed Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too with Su Friedrich, about activist group the Lesbian Avengers. In 2003, she produced John Scagliotti's film Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World about gay and lesbian people in non-Western countries. She had worked with Scagliotti before, having a co-producer credit on his 1999 film After Stonewall. Her 2006 film Cruel and Unusual, co-directed with Dan Hunt and Reid Williams, was a documentary about pre-operative male-female transsexual women in men's prisons. It won the Michael J. Berg Documentary Award at the 2006 Frameline Film Festival and the Freedom Award at L.A. Outfest. Baus has also won the Cine Golden Eagle, the Vito Russo Award, the Chicago International Television Award and the Gold Aurora Award.
Michael R. Steck, better known by the stage name Pandora Boxx, is an American drag queen, comedian, and reality television personality from Rochester, New York. Boxx competed in the second season of RuPaul's Drag Race, placing fifth and winning Miss Congeniality, and subsequently returned for the first and sixth seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. Boxx also appeared in all three seasons of the Drag Race spin-off series RuPaul's Drag U.
Black women filmmakers have made contributions throughout the history of film. According to Nsenga Burton, writer for The Root, "the film industry remains overwhelmingly white and male. In 2020, 74.6 percent of movie directors of theatrical films were white, showing a small decrease from the previous year. In terms of representation, 25.4 percent of film directors were of ethnic minority in 2020. Of the 25.4 percent of minority filmmakers, a small percentage was female.
Bare Behind Bars is a 1980 sexploitation film directed and written by Oswaldo de Oliveira., The film, which was intended as a spoof of the common "women in prison" genre, stars Maria Stella Splendore, Marta Anderson and Danielle Ferrite. The story concerns a group of lesbian inmates who are sexually abused by a sadistic female prison warden. The film features gratuitous nudity and sex scenes.
Desiree Lim is a Malaysian-born Canadian independent film director, producer, and screenwriter. She is known for her films Sugar Sweet (2001), Floored by Love (2005), and The House (2011). Lim tends to work within the realm of family drama and comedy, and highlights themes of lesbianism, multiculturalism, and body positivity. She now works in Canada and Japan.
Pamela Adie is a Nigerian LGBT rights activist, public speaker, screenwriter and filmmaker. Pamela is hailed as a prominent public speaker advocating LGBTQ community and has often raised her voice on empowering LGBTQ community in Nigeria. Her research and works about LGBT rights in Nigeria have featured in several LGBT anthology series. She rose to prominence with her directorial debut Under the Rainbow which reflects her personal memoir. Her production venture Ìfé is deemed as Nigeria's first lesbian film. She is the executive director of non governmental organisation Equality Hub.
