Tambay Amadi Obenson

Tambay Obenson is a Los Angeles-based staff writer for IndieWire, where he focuses on African-American film and television. A veteran writer, filmmaker and entrepreneur, he founded the independent distributor Voyager Film Company in 2005, in response to the lack of distribution for indie films by and about people of African descent. Feature films distributed by the company include "Beautiful Things" (2005), which he wrote, directed, and co-starred in, and "The Man Who Couldn't" (2006). In 2009, he teamed up with a number of black-cinema bloggers to create a single web portal for the cinema of Africa and its diaspora. That site, Shadow and Act, grew rapidly and as the site's chief editor and writer in 2010 he co-founded the joint venture Shadow and Act Films, a film financing and production initiative. Tambay is also co-founder and co-curator of the renowned New Voices in Black Cinema Festival, which takes place annually at BAMCinematek in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him @TambayObenson.