Angela Shelton is the writer-director of Heart, Baby, based on the true story of boxer George Lee Martin, starring Gbenga Akinnagbe and Jackson Rathbone; the film is now playing in select theaters. Shelton had her first screenwriting and producing credit with Tumbleweeds (1999), which won the Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker’s Trophy and earned the lead actress Janet McTeer an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe win. She followed Tumbleweeds with her highly acclaimed adaptation of Kaye Gibbons’ novel Charms For The Easy Life (2002), starring Mimi Rogers and Gena Rowlands. In 2001 Angela made her directorial debut with the documentary Searching For Angela Shelton, in which she discovered that 70% of the women she interviewed with the same name had, like herself, been a victim of rape, childhood sexual abuse and/or domestic violence. The film received many accolades and went on to begin a grassroots movement of survivors and humanitarian organizations around the world dedicated to exposing the epidemic of abuse. Her memoir, Finding Angela Shelton, published by Meredith Publishing in 2006, describes how making the documentary changed her life. She is currently in development on her second feature.
