Roger Ross Williams (born September 16, 1962; Easton) is an American documentary director, producer and writer and the first African American director to win an Academy Award (Oscar), with his short film "Music by Prudence"; this film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2009.
Two intrepid Nairobi women decide to transform what used to be a whites-only library until 1958 into a vibrant cultural hub. Along the way, they must navigate local politics, raise millions for the rebuild, and confront the lingering ghosts of Kenya’s colonial past.
Release Date: 2025-01-26
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Out of the underground dance clubs on the South Side of Chicago, a group of friends turn a new sound into a global movement.
Release Date: 2025-01-26
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 1
The stakes escalate in a longstanding conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, as unresolved historical injustices and the impact of climate change come to the forefront.
Release Date: 2024-10-04
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
A stirring portrait of residents in a small southern US town facing the contentious legacy of the world's largest Confederate monument, which looms over their home.
Release Date: 2024-06-13
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
A teen with autism unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.
Release Date: 2024-01-21
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 11
Taking place over the course of a single day and night, five vignettes tell the story of five New Yorkers who find that their personal relationships to light mirror much larger systems of power playing out across the city.
Release Date: 2023-11-20
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Using innovative animation and expert insights, this documentary based on Ibram X. Kendi's bestseller explores the history of racist ideas in America.
Release Date: 2023-11-10
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Vote Count: 18
An investigation into an American missionary accused of dangerously treating sick children in Uganda despite having no medical training.
Release Date: 2023-09-26
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Episode Count: 3
Vote Count: 11
In the '80s, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington became fashion icons—then transcended their industry by uniting. This is the story of how they claimed their power and shaped the world that followed.
Release Date: 2023-09-19
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Episode Count: 4
Vote Count: 9
The true story of Saúl Armendáriz, a gay amateur wrestler from El Paso that rises to international stardom after he creates the character Cassandro, the “Liberace of Lucha Libre.” In the process, he upends not just the macho wrestling world but also his own life.
Release Date: 2023-09-14
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 119
The revolutionary top-selling American female group of all time, who broke boundaries, influenced an entire generation and survived against all odds, T-Boz and Chilli tell their story for the first time in this feature documentary.
Release Date: 2023-06-03
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer's Assistant
Vote Count: 3
The extraordinary story of disco queen Donna Summer through a rich archive of unpublished film excerpts, home video, photographs, artwork, writings, personal audio and other recordings that span the life of one of the most iconic performers ever to shake a room to its timbers. From her early career with Giorgio Moroder in Germany, to later years more focused on spirituality and family life as a shelter from troubles associated with both notoriety and intimate wounds, her story is all the more special for being told in the first person – both singular and plural.
Release Date: 2023-02-21
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 17
In keeping with the original project, this series seeks to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
Release Date: 2023-01-26
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Episode Count: 6
Vote Count: 15
Slipping between planes of consciousness and existence, filmmaker Alex Ashe’s Magic Ring is a work of both subdued tenderness and wry comic surrealism in which an armed pursuit in Brooklyn results in a series of out-of-body experiences: a mystical encounter in a bookshop, a chat with an ancestral spirit, a whole life flashing by in an instant.
Release Date: 2022-10-12
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Crump's mission to raise the value of Black life as the civil lawyer for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Black farmers and banking while Black victims, Crump challenges America to come to terms with what it owes his clients.
Release Date: 2022-06-17
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Vote Count: 7
George Anthony Morton, a classical painter who spent ten years in federal prison, travels to his hometown to paint his family members. Going back forces George to face his past in his quest to rewrite the script of his life.
Release Date: 2022-03-12
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Vote Count: 5
RANGER is a story about a rite of passage. Set within Kenya’s Maasai homeland, an intimate and contemporary story of self-discovery unfolds, as 12 women become East Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching unit. Upending the male-dominated, reliance upon military-style training to make a wildlife ranger, Virginia, Liz, Momina and Damaris instead undergo a year-long program of deep trauma-release and healing, triggering profound transformation within themselves and sending shockwaves through their communities.
Release Date: 2021-10-01
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Black food is American food. Chef and writer Stephen Satterfield traces the delicious, moving throughlines from Africa to Texas in this docuseries.
Release Date: 2021-05-26
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 4
Vote Count: 6
Based on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ #1 New York Times bestseller and originally adapted and staged by the Apollo Theater, this special combines elements of that production - including powerful readings from Coates’ book - with documentary footage from the actors’ home life, archival footage, and animation.
Release Date: 2020-11-21
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 7
A showcase of some of the most talented underrepresented emerging filmmakers.
Release Date: 2020-10-15
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Character: Host
Episode Count: 1
The personal stories behind eight cases of wrongful conviction that the Innocence Project and organizations within the Innocence Network have worked to highlight and overturn.
Release Date: 2020-04-15
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Episode Count: 9
Vote Count: 29
The Remix: Hip Hop x Fashion highlights the hidden female figures that have curated and shaped hip-hop’s dynamic streetwear and ultimately swayed the entire fashion industry.
Release Date: 2019-05-02
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 1
Jaiquan's Sketch tells a story of the healing power of expressive arts.
Release Date: 2019-05-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Strong Puerto Rican women forced to flee the island after Hurricane Maria have bonded like family in a FEMA hotel in the Bronx. They seek stability in their new life as forces try to pull them apart.
Release Date: 2019-04-28
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 22
The history of New York City's Apollo Theater in Harlem is given the full treatment.
Release Date: 2019-04-24
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 18
An immersive virtual reality documentary experience about the risks faced by blacks on the road in mid 2Oth Century America, and the safe spaces as listed in the famous guide, The Green Book, where they could eat and sleep.
Release Date: 2019-01-25
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 1
These six intimate stories explore the abiding emotional bonds that form between dogs and their caregivers, no matter the circumstances.
Release Date: 2018-11-16
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 23
On New York's Governor's Island, an unprecedented program has the ambitious goal of restoring oysters and their environmental benefits back to New York Harbor. This documentary highlights the teenagers at a public high school that teaches stewardship of the waterways alongside math and English.
Release Date: 2018-11-11
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 3
In this deeply personal film, director Roger Ross Williams sets out on a journey to understand the complex forces of racism and greed currently at work in America's prison system.
Release Date: 2018-07-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 3
Rachel Dolezal became infamous when she was unmasked as a white woman passing for black so thoroughly that she had become the head of her local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. This portrait cuts through the very public controversy to reveal Dolezal’s motivations.
Release Date: 2018-04-23
Department: Production
Job: Executive Producer
Vote Count: 51
A short, bringing all of the side kick characters in Walt Disney's animated films expressing their importance.
Release Date: 2016-10-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
At three years old, a chatty, energetic little boy named Owen Suskind ceased to speak, disappearing into autism with apparently no way out. Almost four years passed and the only stimuli that engaged Owen were Disney films. Then one day, his father donned a puppet—Iago, the wisecracking parrot from Aladdin—and asked “what’s it like to be you?” And poof! Owen replied, with dialogue from the movie. Life, Animated tells the remarkable story of how Owen found in Disney animation a pathway to language and a framework for making sense of the world.
Release Date: 2016-07-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 136
A groundbreaking series that brings America's most award-winning magazine, The New Yorker, to the screen with documentaries, short narrative films, comedy, poetry, animation, and cartoons from the hands of acclaimed filmmakers and artists.
Release Date: 2016-02-16
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 5
A week before the Sinterklaas festivities on December 5, global news channel CNN is digging into the Zwarte Piet controversy with a short documentary. Blackface was made by Oscar-winning documentary maker Roger Ross Williams who said his friends in America had been shocked the first time they saw a photograph of Sinterklaas’ helper.
Release Date: 2015-12-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams tries to understand why the notoriously liberal Dutch dress in blackface during the annual holiday of Sinterklaas.
Release Date: 2015-11-25
Character: Self
Some of this year's most talked about talent open up about the challenges and triumphs of creating critically acclaimed series and performances.
Release Date: 2015-08-02
Character: Self
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 17
Release Date: 2015-05-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2014-09-05
Department: Directing
Job: Director
A powerful exploration of the evangelical campaign to infuse African culture with values imported from America's Christian Right. The film follows American and Ugandan religious leaders fighting sexual immorality and missionaries trying to convince Ugandans to follow biblical law.
Release Date: 2013-10-11
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Vote Count: 17
Music by Prudence tells a self-empowering story of one young woman's struggle who, together with her band, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds and, in her own voice conveys to the world that disability does not mean inability. In addition to its sheer emotional punch, Music by Prudence has become the cornerstone of an advocacy campaign and has been embraced by the UN, Human Rights Watch and the disability community as an unprecedented portrayal advocating for the rights of persons with disabilities. Prudences poignant, inspiring and irreverent message of hope has received an amazing response from press and audiences all across North America, and has won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short and several other awards as it continues drawing in more audiences.
Release Date: 2010-04-01
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Vote Count: 7
Reality series that follows high-level executives as they slip anonymously into the rank-and-file of their own organizations. Each week, a different leader will sacrifice the comfort of their corner office for an undercover mission to examine the inner workings of their operation.
Release Date: 2010-02-07
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 23
Vote Count: 48
ALONE NO LOVE sheds light on child sex abuse in America. Through the work of the Chicago ChildrenaEU(tm)s Advocacy Center (CCAC), one of the nationaEU(tm)s largest and most progressive centers for sexually abused children, we can observe firsthand the challenging work of a multidisciplinary team of doctors, stateaEU(tm)s attorneys, police officers and social workers whose tireless efforts continue to provide refuge for sexually abused kids in Chicago.
Release Date: 2007-12-31
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Release Date: 2006-09-07
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Made in Hollywood is a talk show hosted by Kylie Erica Mar and Julie L. Harkness airing in syndication since September 30, 2005. The series is currently in its seventh season. The series is filmed in two studios in Los Angeles, California and New York City. Made in Hollywood also airs a spinoff series, Made in Hollywood: Teen Edition.
Release Date: 2005-09-30
Character: Self
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 8
Release Date: 2004-09-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Profiles the culture, lifestyles, and rituals within the New York City subways.
Release Date: 2003-10-05
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2003-09-08
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2003-07-05
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2003-05-01
Department: Production
Job: Producer
For these lipstick Cinderella's, balls are a real drag. With their duct tape D-Cups, these torch songbirds crown the drag queen within. From dudes to divas, these boys will be girls.
Release Date: 2003-03-03
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2002-09-07
Department: Directing
Job: Director
TV Show Details
Release Date: 2002-09-03
Department: Production
Job: Producer
Episode Count: 1
Sheila Bridges shares her expertise and experience to accomplish interior design projects and solve design dilemmas.
Release Date: 2002-01-01
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 2
A prime time special that chronicled the six day renovation of an historic amphitheater and rock-strewn soccer field in New York City with donated materials and pro bono services. The work was estimated to take one year.
Release Date: 2001-09-15
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2001-07-05
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 2000-09-05
Department: Directing
Job: Director
This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.
Release Date: 1999-08-09
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 13
Showcasing the best in international documentaries, Storyville has developed an enviable reputation since its inception more than a decade ago. Screening over 340 films, from some 70 different countries, the strand has garnered a staggering array of awards: five Oscars, 15 Griersons, three Peabodys and two International Emmys. In true, unique, Storyville style, the new series promises to deliver the strand's usual eclectic mix of compelling stories from across the globe.
Release Date: 1997-11-15
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Episode Count: 1
Vote Count: 7
Documentary profiles four filmmakers whose films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and the way their lives have changed since.
Release Date: 1997-09-08
Department: Directing
Job: Director
Release Date: 1996-09-07
Department: Production
Job: Producer
People Magazine presents its retrospective of the most interesting people and events of 1995.
Release Date: 1995-09-08
Department: Production
Job: Producer
A documentary film following the rise of Ebony and Jet and their growth into a brand with a readership base in the millions which has had an undeniable effect on American culture.
Department: Production
Job: Producer