Christine Turner is a filmmaker whose portraits of artists, activists and everyday people capture the beauty and struggle of life. Her most recent film, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible—a journey through the life and work of the visionary jazz musician, composer and poet Sun Ra—premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and is now playing festivals internationally.
Previously, Christine directed the 2024 Oscar-nominated short documentary, The Barber of Little Rock (co-directed with John Hoffman), about a local barber's fight for a just economy (The New Yorker). The previous year she released, J’Nai Bridges: Unamplified, which follows the Grammy-nominated opera singer as she takes the stage in “A Knee on the Neck,” a tribute to George Floyd (PBS/American Masters).
Other notable work includes: Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’ (Paramount+), which was nominated for a Peabody and won an NAACP Image Award; Homegoings (PBS/POV), a critically-acclaimed portrait of a renowned Harlem funeral director; and short films on the pioneering artist Betye Saar (New York Times Op-Docs) and celebrated painters Amy Sherald & Kehinde Wiley (The New Yorker).
As an episodic director and producer for television, Christine has also collaborated on non-fiction series such as The 1619 Project (Hulu), Amend: The Fight for America (Netflix) and Art in the Twenty-First Century (PBS), among others. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America and serves on the board of the non-profit Art21.