Beandrea JULY

It’s hard to think of a dancer who reps Los Angeles harder than Storm DeBarge. So when dance industry veteran Fatima Robinson needed a choreographer to bring authentic Westside flavor to the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, she knew exactly who could translate L.A. dance culture to the football field.
For DeBarge, a native Angeleno, the opportunity was the moment she had been working toward—as a movement artist, choreographer and director. In a show headlined by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, featurin...

Brian Tyree Henry has made a career of playing men under pressure—haunted, hardened and often held back by systems much bigger than they are.
“Hopefully, I’ll be in a love story sooner or later,” he jokes, “because, boy, am I tired of running for my life.”
Henry drops that line near the end of our conversation. It’s funny, yes—but also revealing of his nearly two decades in the business. It isn’t always easy to live with the effects of what it’s like to embody these complex men, I guess.
“No,...

In “Luz,” writer-director Flora Lau immerses viewers in the mystical world of a simulated reality game of the same name. Set in Chongqing, one of China’s largest cities, the film follows Ren (Sandrine Pinna), a gallerist who travels to Paris to visit her stepmother, Sabine (Isabelle Huppert). Sabine, long divorced from Ren’s father — a successful painter — has recently experienced fainting spells that have landed her in the hospital. Despite her serious health issues, she takes a laissez-fair...

The premiere of the genre-blurring feature “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is a drama in and of itself: just days before it was scheduled to screen, the rights-holder to the film pulled it from the festival. Then, a few days into the festival, a surprise sale of the rights to a new owner cleared the way for the film to screen after all. Neither Kahlil Joseph, the artist and filmmaker who directed the film, nor Shari Frilot, the Senior Film Programmer who introd...

The Sundance Film Festival is returning to Park City, Utah, with a slate of more than 120 independent films making their debut to an in-person crowd for the first time in two years. The festival attracts filmmakers and actors from around the globe hoping to become the next “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Get Out.”

Author Q& A with Alison Mariella Désir on her memoir "Running While Black"

A look back at “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees on its 10th Anniversary.

Season 1: Co-created, Co-hosted, Produced, Edited and Mixed by Beandrea July

CherryPicks presents CherryPop: a podcast about women and sex onscreen. Tune in each week for our deep dives into some of the most compelling portrayals of female pleasure in film and television. Hosts Beandrea July and Meg McCarthy take listeners on a journey to celebrate feminine pleasure across a diverse and wide-ran

A Black feminist discussion of the FX miniseries MRS. AMERICA starring Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, Niecy Nash, Margo Martindale, Sarah Paulson.

Featuring The Greenidge Sisters: Kaitlyn, Kerri and Kirsten.

Produced, Edited, Mixed by Beandrea July

Fiction podcast created, written and directed by Beandrea July
Recent college grad Selah Copeland (Jerrika Hinton) is being groomed to takeover her mother's accounting business, but after a life-changing weekend away at a yoga retreat, she's considering other options. Centered is an audio drama about finding yourself on and off the mat.

Back in 2018, Green Book premiered to acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival, winning the People's Choice award and the admiration of seasoned white critics covering the festival. Once a wider cross-section of critics and moviegoers got to see it, of course, the response was considerably more divided.

Rather than ignore such characters as the film industry has often done in the past, mainstream and indie directors alike explored their lives, and sometimes the results were astonishing.

“I love the fact that this is a Black-ass show,” said one woman on the call, “so we can have an angry person and a happy person, a sad person, a ratchet person. Give me everything—the whole window of emotions.”
I was sitting in on a regular Zoom meetup with 30 young Black professionals discussing the recent season finale of the HBO hit Insecure...

For KPCC's The Frame: In the new documentary, "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am," we learn about the woman behind the work to see how she got to this distinguished place in American culture. Directed by photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January. Film critic Beandrea July reviewed it for Out magazine at the time. Now that it’s in theaters, she takes another look at the film with the help of a leading expert on Morrison’s work.