Kiri Laurelle Davis is an African-American filmmaker based in New York City. Her first documentary, done while enrolled at Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, A Girl Like Me (2005) has received significant news coverage.
Kiri Davis' mother, an education consultant, raised her daughter to be proud of her race and color.[1] After completing her high school education two years after making her award-winning documentary, Davis was due to matriculate at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington DC for the fall 2007 semester.[2]
When just 16 and a student at the Urban Academy, Davis became interested in Brown v. Board of Education, and also Kenneth and Mamie Clark's groundbreaking study of color preferences among young black children. She repeated the Clark study and asked children to choose between one of two dolls: a light- and a dark-skinned doll. Fifteen out of the twenty-one children preferred the lighter doll when asked to choose "the nice doll."
The documentary that resulted includes selections from her repeat study and interviews with friends who talk about the importance of color, hair quality, and facial features for young black woman today in the United States.
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She discusses her film "A Girl Like Me" in the 2008 film The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante, Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou