Tamara Shogaolu

Biography

Tamara Shogaolu is an Emmy® Award-winning, Peabody-nominated director, writer, and artist whose work merges cinematic storytelling with bold experimentation. Hailed by Forbes, The Guardian, and Vogue as a visionary voice in film and emerging media, she crafts stories that are intimate, subversive, and deeply human. Her projects have received top honors at the Sundance Film Festival (2023), SXSW (2022), and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA, 2021 & 2023)—one of the world’s leading festivals for documentary and immersive storytelling. Her work has also been supported by the Sundance Institute and has screened at MoMA, Tribeca, and leading institutions around the world. A Fulbright Scholar, Luce Fellow, semifinalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship, and graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts—where she was a Burton Lewis Endowed Scholar for Directing—Shogaolu has directed and written for Netflix, PBS, and Frontline, and written for Sony Pictures Animation. She is also a three-time nominee for the Gouden Kalf, the Netherlands’ top film and television award. She marks her return to live-action with Something Real, a dark comedy about modern love starring Sasheer Zamata and Tommy Dewey, which she is currently developing into a feature titled Motherboard. She is also at work on Witch, Please, a witchy comedy co-written with her writing partner Becky Mandelbaum, and Black Dirt, a solo-written psychological thriller developed through the Motion Picture Academy Accelerator. Across comedy, thriller, and hybrid formats, her voice remains unmistakable: inventive, emotionally rich, and always a step ahead.