Filmmakers and Producers

Yoruba Richen

Yoruba has been working as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker in New York City for the past 10 years. Her work focuses on illuminating issues of race, space and power. In 2007, she won a Fulbright award in filmmaking and traveled to Salvador, Brazil where she began production of Sisters of the Good Death - a documentary uncovering the origins of the oldest African women's association in the Americas and the annual festival the hold celebrating the end of slavery. Before coming to Brazil, Yoruba was a producer for the independent television and radio program Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. In 2004, she awarded an International Reporting Project fellowship and traveled to South Africa to produce and direct Promised Land- a documentary about race, reconciliation and land reform in post-apartheid South Africa. Portions of PROMISED LAND were broadcast on the PBS program Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zacharia and screened at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. In 2006, the film won the Fledgling Fund Award for Socially Conscious Documentaries presented at the Independent Feature Project in New York City. From 2001-2004, Yoruba was an associate producer for Brian Ross, the Chief Investigative Correspondent at ABC News. She was also an associate producer for a number of films including the BET series Biographies in Black and the feature film Brother to Brother. Yoruba was the co-producer of TAKE IT FROM ME, a documentary exploring the effects of welfare reform on New York City women. The film was broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V in 2001. She received a B.A from Brown University and Masters in City Planning from University of California, Berkeley.

AVAILABLE FROM TWN

Promised Land
Yoruba Richen
Producer: Yoruba Richen
2010, 57 min., Color, South Africa/US
Though apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, economic injustices between blacks and whites remain unresolved. As revealed in Yoruba Richen’s incisive PROMISED LAND, the most potentially explosive issue is land. The film follows two black communities as they struggle to reclaim land from white own...


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TWN acknowledges that in New York we are on the unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape, Canarsie, Shinecock, and Munsee peoples and challenges the harm that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous and People of Color communities here and abroad, which is why we all need to be part of the struggle for rights, equality and justice.

TWN is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Color Congress, MOSAIC, New York Community Trust, Peace Development Fund, Ford Foundation, Golden Globe Foundation, Kolibri Foundation and individual donors.