Brooke Obie

Photo credit: Logan Alexander

Brooke C. Obie, JD, MFA

Brooke C. Obie, JD, MFA, is a filmmaker, film/TV screenwriter, award-winning author, award-winning entertainment journalist and critic. Brooke is the director of the documentary feature film ABANITU: A FAMILY DOCUMENTARY which had its world premiere at the 2024 Essence Film Festival and the narrative short GOD IS A FREQUENCY,  which also received festival recognition. She is also a 2024 Women in Film Writer Fellow and a 2023 Stowe Story Labs Screenwriting Fellow.

Brooke has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Will Packer Media’s lifestyle site xoNecole, Co-Editor of Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and Deputy Director of Refinery29 Unbothered. As Managing Editor for the Black film/TV site Shadow & Act, she was named one of The Root 100’s most influential African Americans in 2019 for her viral and exclusive interview with the family of Dr. Donald Shirley, “How ‘Green Book’ And the Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole,” which shook up Hollywood and the 2019 awards season, leading conversations about appropriation, white savior narratives and systemic racism in Hollywood.

Her film and TV criticism often goes viral, with her thought-provoking and thorough critiques leading cultural conversations online and off, including appearances on TV and radio panels, like NPR’s 1A Movie Club.

Her debut novel BOOK OF ADDIS: CRADLED EMBERS won the 2018 Accra International Book Festival Awards’ Independent Writer’s Award, the 2017 Phillis Wheatley Book Award for First Fiction and the 2017 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Self-Published Fiction. In 2019, she was the summer writer-in-residence in Saint Paul de Vence where she worked on the BOOK OF ADDIS sequel.

Brooke graduated from Hampton University, summa cum laude and Mercer University School of Law where she was the Eleventh Circuit Survey Editor of the Mercer Law Review. Brooke received her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and was a 2014 finalist for the Fulbright Fellowship for her thesis, which became BOOK OF ADDIS: CRADLED EMBERS.

She has attended Columbia University’s creative writing workshop in Paris, France and was a 2016 Callaloo Fellow at Oxford University, Oxford, England, where she began work on the BOOK OF ADDIS sequel and continued writing as the 2019 Summer Writer-in-Residence in France.

Before becoming the first editor-at-large for EBONY.com, she served as a contributing editor for the site and its interim News & Lifestyle editor in spring 2013 where she wrote the column, “The Spiritual Life.” She began her professional writing career as the creator of the two-time Black Weblog Award-winning blog The Dithering of a District Diva, named one of Essence Magazine’s “Best Online Sites.”

Brooke’s work has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, LA Times, The Guardian, Salon, Essence, Ebony, Marie Claire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Teen Vogue & more. She lives happily in Los Angeles.