C. A. Griffith (MFA, University of California-Santa Barbara) is an award-winning filmmaker with more than three decades of film production experience. Currently an Associate Professor of Film/Media Production in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University, Griffith's film credits include cinematographer, co-producer, co-director and co-editor of Mountains That Take Wing (2010, Women Make Movies), América’s Home (2014) and Queer, Broke & Amazing! (2024).

 

Griffith's early career film credits include her dramatic feature debut, Del Otro Lado/The Other Side (1999). Shot on location in Mexico City, Griffith directed, co-produced and co-edited this Spanish language, independent feature on love, AIDS and immigration.

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She began her film career in the camera department (1987-1991) as a First Assistant Cameraperson/Focus Puller (1st AC), Camera Operator, and Cinematographer / Director of Photography (DP) in New York’s independent film community with Juice starring Tupac Shakur ( 1st AC), award-winning PBS and BBC documentaries such as A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (DP, she began as 1st AC), two D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus films: Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You (camera operator) and Depeche Mode 101 (1st AC), and as 1st AC on Eyes on the Prize, St. Clair Bourne’s Making ‘Do the Right Thing’, as well as music videos from Tracy Chapman's "Born to Fight" and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to The Rolling Stones "Rock and a Hard Place.”

 

As a writer, Griffith’s screenplays made the finals of the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs and won a top award from the Latino Screenplay Competition. Her publications include writings in Transnational Solidarities and Feminist Futures (forthcoming from Duke University Press), Filming Difference, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, The Wild Good, as well as the journals Meridians, Signs and Calyx.