Iyabo Boyd

Iyabo Boyd is most widely known as the Founder and Co-Executive Director of Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM), a nonprofit that works to disrupt inequity in the film industry by nurturing, amplifying, and investing in the creative capacity and professional success of BIPOC women and nonbinary people working in the documentary industry. Founded in 2015, BGDM serves nearly 5,000 members globally.  

Iyabo previously held positions in artist development, program management, and funding at the Points North Institute, Topic.com, Kickstarter, Doc Society’s Good Pitch, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, and Gotham. In 2021, Iyabo was a recipient of DocNYC’s New Leader Award, was named a “Black Visionary'' by the Sundance Film Institute, and a Documentary Film Influencer by IndieWire. 

Iyabo produced FOR AHKEEM, a documentary feature about a teenage Black girl coming of age in St. Louis just after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, which premiered at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, and in the US at the Tribeca Film Festival. For this project, she was a Sundance Creative Producers Fellow and an Impact Partners Creative Producers Fellow. She also produced SUN BELT EXPRESS, a fictional immigration comedy starring Tate Donovan and Ana de la Reguera which won the Dramatic Grand Prix Award at the 2014 Chelsea Film Festival.

Iyabo Boyd is also a fiction writer, director, and producer that strives to tell stories from under-explored perspectives, and to reflect the dynamic humanity of women and people of color. Her short ME TIME, a Black feminist comedy about self care and masturbation, played over 25 festivals in 2020 including Blackstar, Rooftop Films, and Miami Shorts Fest, and won 9 awards including Best Director at the Atlanta Comedy Film Festival. Her previous short FOREVER ALLIE, about a gay black man writing letters to his recently deceased cat, played the 2014 Seattle, Atlanta, and Boston LGBT Film Festivals. Her upcoming feature, KAYLA & EDDIE EN FRANÇAIS, a collaboration with her dad, is about an estranged Black father and daughter reconnecting in Paris. For this project, Iyabo was a fellow in the Sundance Film Festival’s Talent Forum, the Sundance Film Institute’s Screenwriting Intensive, IFP’s No Borders Project Forum, and was awarded a SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting Grant. 

Originally from Denver, CO, Iyabo graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BA in Film & Television, and lives in the Bronx, NY.