Warrington Hudlin
Warrington Hudlin is a veteran producer of motion pictures, television, and online media. His work challenges the false dichotomy between social concerns and popular entertainment. Best known as the producer of the landmark African American films, HOUSE PARTY, BOOMERANG, and BEBE KIDS, and television specials, COSMIC SLOP and UNSTOPPABLE, Hudlin is now developing of a genre busting, episodic drama, THE SIEGE OF DETROIT.
As the founding president of BFF (aka the Black Filmmaker Foundation), Hudlin has been a pioneering community organizer in the black film movement for over three decades.
Hudlin is the Vice Chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of the Moving Image where he curates two monthly film series, FIST & SWORD, CHANGING THE PICTURE, and annual film symposiums: “Massa’s Gaze” (2014), “Endangered by the Moving Image” (2015), the “Color of Comedy” (2016), and a pre-birthday Celebration of the films of Harry Belafonte (2017).
Warrington Hudlin grew up in the notorious city of East St. Louis and attended an experimental high school affiliated with the legendary artist/scholar, Katherine Dunham (who helped him get a scholarship that paid his tuition to Yale). Hudlin graduated from Yale with honors and was then mentored by two more legends, Melvin Van Peebles and Harry Belafonte.
Warrington Hudlin’s accomplishments are built on the foundation laid by his ancestors, beginning with his great-great-grandfather, Peter Hudlin, who escaped from a slave plantation in Virginia, married an indigenous woman from the Cherokee Nation, and became an agent in the US anti-slavery movement known as the Underground Railroad.
Their son and his great grandfather, Richard Hudlin (1858-1918), was a writer, newspaper publisher, and shortly before his death, became one of the world’s first black filmmakers.