Haile Gerima is an Ethiopian film director, screenwriter, writer, producer, and philosopher. He has been a professor of film at Howard University in Washington, DC, since 1975.

After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa (1993). This formally ambitious tale of a plantation slave revolt was ignored by U.S. distributors, but Gerima tapped into African American communities, and booked sold-out screenings in independent theaters around the country.

During his 2010 Hirshon residency The New School organized the screening of this 1993 classic.