While a sophomore studying film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she published her first editorial in The Source Magazine, taking on Dr. Dre for assaulting music journalist Dee Barnes. Her essays, criticism, and profiles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, VIBE, The Washington Post, NPR and Spin Magazine, and in more than a dozen anthologies. Known for her directness and clarity of vision, hampton’s practice traverses between film, cultural criticism, and archival excavation to create works that insist upon the urgency of justice, memory, and liberation.
hampton’s filmmaking has been described by Vanity Fair as having “the power to change culture.” Her narrative short I Am Ali, photographed by Arthur Jafa, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2002). Her first documentary feature, Black August (2010), presented rare interviews with Assata Shakur and advocated for the release of U.S. political prisoners. She has since produced a body of award-winning films including the archival memoir It Was All a Dream (Tribeca Film Festival, 2024), the short Freshwater (NYT Op-Docs/PBS; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2023), We Hold These Truths (LA Opera, 2022), and Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop (Netflix, 2023).
hampton taught at Stanford University and has lectured at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Howard University, Harvard and Princeton University and dozens of others. She was honored with artist residencies at UCLA, NYU and the Bellagio Center and has been granted awards from The Kresge, Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others.
She is the Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning showrunner and executive producer of Surviving R. Kelly (Netflix, 2019). Time magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world.
Though working across mediums, hampton consistently returns to the archive and to community memory, building a practice that combats erasure and exposes the entanglement of art, violence, and power. Her films and essays, equally, are diagrams of survival and testimony, charting Black life in the United States and beyond. She continues to live and work near a large body of water.
