Kiri Laurelle Davis is an American filmmaker based in New York City.
Her first documentary, A Girl Like Me (2005), made while enrolled at
Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, received significant news coverage.Kiri
Davis' mother, an education consultant, raised her daughter to be
proud of her African-American heritage. 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.When aged
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 two
dolls: a light-skinned one and a dark-skinned one. Fifteen out of the
twenty-one children preferred the lighter-skinned doll when asked to
pick "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 women today in the United States.Davis discusses A Girl
Like Me in the 2008 film The Black Candle, directed by M. K. Asante,
Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou.
Her first documentary, A Girl Like Me (2005), made while enrolled at
Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, received significant news coverage.Kiri
Davis' mother, an education consultant, raised her daughter to be
proud of her African-American heritage. 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.When aged
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 two
dolls: a light-skinned one and a dark-skinned one. Fifteen out of the
twenty-one children preferred the lighter-skinned doll when asked to
pick "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 women today in the United States.Davis discusses A Girl
Like Me in the 2008 film The Black Candle, directed by M. K. Asante,
Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou.
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