Most Recent: February 7, 2018
Adrienne Anderson is the founder and executive director of the Equity Film Market and Black Laurel Films (formerly, the International Black Women’s Film Festival). She is a published author (Word: Rap, Politics, & Feminism), entrepreneur and analyst for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. In 2001 she established Black Laurel Films through a series of quarterly free screenings and an annual film festival. Black Laurel Films uses the cinematic narrative to normalize the presence of women of color as equitable partners in creative visual storytelling. Ms. Anderson received an Innovators Award from the Hull Family Foundation and Oaklandish and was an inaugural honoree and later speaker and panelist at the Symposium for Equity in the Entertainment Industry. Her film festival has screened over 400 films from around the world including Greenland, Germany, Paris, Ghana, Canada, Australia, Dutch Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and India. In 2012, she hosted a reception featuring Academy Award nominated producer Josh Penn and a screening of his film BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or and the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance. She also premiered the film and hosted an appearance by Academy Award®-winner Octavia Spencer. Her film programming experience includes serving as a Jury Member of the University of San Francisco’s Student Film Competition and curating speaker panels and film series with the San Francisco Main Public Library. Ms. Anderson is also the owner and proprietor of American Royal Tea™, and her teas were selected as gifts for nominees of the 2015 Screen Actors Guild (“SAG”) Awards, and she was featured in issue No. 11 of the U.K. magazine The Gentlewoman.