Ina Norris did not wait to be wanted. She built the rooms herself.
Norris, 65, is an educator, filmmaker, author and playwright, and the founder of the Kwanzaa Film Festival, whose 10th anniversary edition runs in Harlem from December 26 to January 1. She was raised on Long Island in the 1960s, a member of the first migration of Black people there, during the era of school integration. “All I knew was that I wasn’t wanted,” she said. “I didn’t understand anything.”
She called her first play Nobody Loves a Black Little Girl When She Becomes a Woman, and it became her own company, In A Woman Productions. Her plays have gone up at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, and Ain’t Yo Mama Crying on a Pancake Box-Car earned her a Gregory Millard fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
In 1991 she began raising money for The Learning Tree Preparatory School, a Black independent school in the Bronx, where she later ran performing arts for 11 years. She founded the NYC Young Producers Project. She has lived in the Bronx for 45 years.
“I wanted to build a film festival around the community and Black people around the world,” she said. Hers is the only one built on the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa.
Her advice to people starting out is short. “Don’t be afraid to ask someone to mentor you, no matter your age,” she said.
