Byron Hurt
Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, published writer, anti-sexist activist, and lecturer. He is also the former host of the Emmy-nominated television show, REEL WORKS with BYRON HURT. Since 1993, he has been using his craft, his voice, and his writings to broaden and deepen how people think about gender, race, sex, violence, music, and visual media. As an activist, Byron has served as a gender violence prevention educator. The former Northeastern University football quarterback was also a founding member of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, the leading college-based rape and domestic violence prevention initiative for college and professional athletics. Hurt also served as an Associate Director of the first gender violence prevention program in the United States Marine Corps.
Hurt began his professional film career with I AM A MAN: Black Masculinity in America. His most popular documentary to date, however, is Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (BBR). It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was later broadcast nationally on the Emmy award-winning PBS series Independent Lens (drawing more than 1.3 million viewers). Since then, it has screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide. The Chicago Tribune named it “one of the best documentary films in 2007.” In 2010, MSNBC’s TheGriot.com named Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes one of the Top 10 most important black films of the decade.
In 2008, Hurt released If Five-0 Shoots and Barack & Curtis. Both were critically acclaimed and the latter exploded in the blogosphere as a part of The Masculinity Project, further cementing Hurt as a staple in the independent film world.
As a writer, Byron’s works have been published in several anthologies, including books edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Kevin Powell.
Hurt has been featured in various media publications ranging from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times; O, The Oprah Magazine to Mother Jones, Black Enterprise, and The Source and XXL Magazines, as well as allhiphop.com. He has also appeared or been heard on NPR, CNN, Access Hollywood, MTV, BET, ABC News World Tonight, NBC-New York, C-Span, and The Michael Baisden Show, among countless other outlets. Comments and reviews of his films can be found all over the Internet and in the blogosphere.
Because of his work, Hurt has lectured at hundreds of campuses, presented at numerous professional conferences, and trained thousands of young men and women on cutting-edge issues.
He has completed his newest documentary, Soul Food Junkies, a film about the history and legacy of soul food for PBS.
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