Phillip Youmans is a filmmaker from the 7th Ward of New Orleans. At 19, Phillip became the youngest and first African-American director to win the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival for his feature-length debut, Burning Cane, which he wrote, directed, shot and edited during his final years of high school. Phillip is also the youngest director to ever have a feature film compete at the Tribeca Film Festival. Distributed by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Releasing, Burning Cane opened in select theaters on October 25th, 2019 and was released on Netflix on November 6, 2019. Phillip was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director and a Film Independent Spirit Award for his work on the film. Recently, Phillip wrote, directed and edited a short film for Hulu’s Black History Month titled Imagine a Moon Colony, about a black family in 1970 Los Angeles that imagines the year 2020 through a black lens and creates abstract visuals based on their predictions.
