Director/Writer Michelle Parkerson is from Washington, DC. Her award-winning documentaries include But Then, She’s Betty Carter, Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock, A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (all of which aired nationally on PBS) and Storme’: The Lady of the Jewel Box. Her films have screened at several major festivals, including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, AFI Fest, 2024 BFI FLARE Festival, DC/DOX, FiImfest DC, DOC NYC, and BlackStar Film Festival. Some of her earlier works stream on The Criterion Channel.

Michelle has received numerous grants and awards, among them, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the DC Mayor’s Art Award, grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Rainbow History Project’s Community Pioneer Award and a HumanitiesDC Docs Grant. Her 2021 documentary, Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse, revives the storied history of a Washington, DC, Black LGBTQ cultural renaissance in the 1980s and premiered at Filmfest DC. CAMILLE A. BROWN: GIANT STEPS, Parkerson’s latest film, co-directed with producer Shellée M. Haynesworth, was commissioned by PBS American Masters / Firelight Media for the Short Documentary series, In The Making: Season 3 (2025).

Shellée M. Haynesworth is an Emmy and Telly Award-winning director, producer, storyteller, and writer. She is the visionary behind Indigo Creative Works—a boutique multimedia content studio—she is acclaimed for crafting visually compelling narratives that explore the intersections of arts, culture, Black and LGBTQ history, racial equity, and social justice. Her work inspires resilience and amplifies historically marginalized voices.

Shellée has collaborated with leading media outlets and institutions, including Black Entertainment Television (BET), PBS, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Firelight Media, the Gates Foundation, and Meta/Facebook. Her recent directing and producing credits include Daufuskie Island and Beyond!, a 2023 Silver Telly Award-winning project celebrating the enduring spirit of the Gullah Geechee community in Coastal Carolina; Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse, a documentary honoring a pivotal Black LGBTQ cultural space in Washington, DC, and CAMILLE A. BROWN: GIANT STEPS (NAACP Image Awards nominee), a portrait of the prolific choreographer and director Camille A. Brown, whose bold, ancestral-rooted work explores Black identity through Diasporic dance. CAMILLE A. BROWN: GIANT STEPS is part of Firelight Media and PBS American Masters’ In the Making Season 3 series, premiering across PBS platforms in Spring 2025.

Her films have been featured at prestigious festivals, including DOC NYC, Filmfest DC, BlackStar Film Festival, and DC/DOX, among others.