Ali LeRoi is a photographer as well as the Emmy Award-winning co-creator/executive producer/writer of the critically acclaimed comedy “Everybody Hates Chris,” a series inspired by the childhood experiences of comedian Chris Rock. He is a Golden Globe nominee, a 2007 NAACP Image Award winner for best writer in a comedy series, as well as a winner of the 2007 AFI TV Program of the Year Award.
LeRoi served as a producer and writer on “The Chris Rock Show,” for which he won an Emmy, a Cable Ace Award, and received five Emmy Award nominations. He is an NAACP Awards Best Director nominee for his work on Everybody Hates Chris, and has directed segments for the “77th Annual Academy Awards,” as well as for the “Orlando Jones Show.”
Major motion picture credits include producing and co-writing “Head of State” and “Down to Earth,” as well as producing cult-favorite, “Pootie Tang.”
Photography for him is meditation, memory, and connection. Taking time to consider what something is. Why something is. Who someone is. For LeRoi photography freezes the fractions of sections in between all of the things he sees and does and holds still all of the places and people he passes by and gives him a moment to consider them, inspect them, appreciate them, and remember them.
While he has a focus on people, and exploring the breadth of their condition and their ability to connect to the world around them, as well as their ability to connect with him, he also ventures into architecture as abstract, and it’s collision as form, as still life. Much of his work grows out of a strongly held sense of solitude and a desire to connect to the things around him. He has no hard and fast rules about purity or constraints around editing an image. He does what he feel. And show it. He assumes that his body of work will take on a character as it grows, as he is it’s singular filter.
Originally from Chicago, LeRoi currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons.
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Eli Reed - The Candid Frame Ep. 100
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Stella Johnson is a photographer and educator known for her passionate and honest documentary projects. She received a Core Fulbright Scholar Grant to photograph in Mexico in 2003, and Fulbright Senior Specialist grants to teach in Mexico in 2006 and in Colombia in 2018. The University of Maine Press published her monograph, Al Sol: Photographs from Mexico, Cameroon and Nicaragua in 2008. Johnson’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally.
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