hampton is the Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning showrunner and executive producer of Surviving R. Kelly, the landmark documentary series that reshaped public conversation around abuse, complicity, and survivor testimony. Described by Vanity Fair as possessing “the power to change culture,” her films examine the entanglements of justice, representation, and historical memory.

Her work as a director and producer includes It Was All a Dream (Tribeca, 2024), Freshwater (New York Times Op-Docs/PBS, 2023), We Hold These Truths (LA Opera, 2022), Treasure (Frameline, 2015), Black August (2010), and I Am Ali (Sundance, 2002). She has also executive produced acclaimed projects including Songs from the Hole (Netflix) It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It (HBO) and Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop (Netflix). Across genres and formats, her work returns to a central question: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and who controls the narrative.

Emerging from the cultural transformations of the 1990s, hampton’s early essays and criticism helped shape conversations around music, race, feminism, and cultural politics. While still a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she published widely discussed editorials and criticism confronting violence against women in hip-hop media, setting the tone for a career marked by cultural intervention as much as observation. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, VIBE, NPR, Spin, and more than a dozen anthologies. In 2010, she collaborated with Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter on his bestselling memoir, Decoded.

Alongside her film and writing practice, hampton has worked extensively in movement spaces as a strategist, advisor, and organizer. Her work has engaged questions of racial justice, state violence, gender inequity, and public accountability, including collaborations with organizations such as MomsRising, Working Families Party, and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Whether in media, institutions, or movement work, her practice reflects a sustained commitment to examining how narratives shape power—and what becomes possible when those narratives change.

hampton has received fellowships, residencies, and honors from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture, Kresge Arts in Detroit, and the Mellon and Ford Foundations. She has taught, lectured, and led workshops at institutions including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Howard, and Spelman. In 2019, TIME named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Born in Detroit, hampton continues to work across disciplines, building projects that sit at the intersection of art, memory, and social change.