Marsai Martin started acting in TV commercials when she was five and is now an award-winning actor, producer, and social media influencer.

At age five, Marsai Martin started acting in TV commercials. Before long, she was given a role on the TV show Black-ish, which has earned the teen awards and national attention. The next steps were to produce her own movie and start her own production company. This hardworking teenager is poised to take over Hollywood. These accomplishments have forged Marsai into a strong teenager. In this book, readers will examine her life story and learn more about the entertainment industry through narrative text, engaging photos, and graphics. Readers will come away inspired to get creative and be Teen Strong. At just 32 pages, Full Tilt Fast Reads help striving middle school readers build reading stamina and stay engaged with high-interest low-level content and dynamic topics.

This critical study interrogates the intersection of race and gender media representations on screen and behind the scenes. The thought-provoking investigation on the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Queen Sugar series shows the ways in which the television drama is a significant contribution to mainstream media that creates in-depth conversations concerning African American women’s social roles, social class, and social change. Ollie L. Jefferson provides a unique analysis of the television production by using the exemplary representations conceptual framework to contextualize and theorize research contributing to systemic change. Jefferson highlights the best practices used by African American female executive producers, Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, by examining Queen Sugar as a case study. The investigation shows how the decision-makers produced multidimensional female characters to illustrate the complex humanity of Black lives. This book broadens understanding of the media industry’s need for culturally sensitive and conscious inclusion of women and people of color behind the scenes—as media owners, creators, writers, directors, and producers—to put an end to the persistent and pervasive misrepresentations of African American women on screen. Scholars of television studies, film studies, media studies, race studies, and women’s studies will find this book particularly useful.

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! The entertainment industry includes TV shows and movies, plays, comedy, and more. New people are always ready to show off their talent. Black entertainers such as Queen Latifah, Donald Glover, and Zendaya transform the industry and move people's emotions. They deliver performances and create works that inspire audiences in every generation. Discover more Black entertainers and learn about their many achievements and how they continue to impact entertainment.

With iconic imagery and engrossing text, Black TV is the first book of its kind to celebrate the groundbreaking, influential, and often under-appreciated shows centered on Black people and their experiences from the last fifty years. Over the past decade, television has seen an explosion of acclaimed and influential debut storytellers including Issa Rae (Insecure), Donald Glover (Atlanta), and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You). This golden age of Black television would not be possible without the actors, showrunners, and writers that worked for decades to give voice to the Black experience in America. Written by veteran TV reporter Bethonie Butler, Black TV tells the stories behind the pioneering series that led to this moment, celebrating the laughs, the drama, and the performances we’ve loved over the last fifty years. Beginning with Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that made Diahann Carroll the first Black woman to lead a prime-time network series as something other than a servant, she explores the 1960s and 1970s as an era of unprecedented representation, with shows like Soul Train, Roots, and The Jeffersons. She unpacks the increasingly nuanced comedies of the 1980s from 227 to A Different World, and how they paved the way for the ’90s Black-sitcom boom that gave us The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single. Butler also looks at the visionary comedians—from Flip Wilson to the Wayans siblings to Dave Chappelle—and connects all these achievements to the latest breakthroughs in television with showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, and Quinta Brunson leading the charge. With dozens of photographs reminding readers of memorable moments and scenes, Butler revisits breakout performances and important guest appearances, delivering some overdue accolades along the way. So, put on your Hillman sweatshirt, make some popcorn, and get ready for a dyn-o-mite retrospective of the most groundbreaking and entertaining shows in television history.

A nonfiction biography chronicling the life of Ira Aldridge, an African American actor who overcame racism to become one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century.