Yvonne Michelle Shirley is a director and producer of narrative and documentary films based in Newark, NJ. Her short film, Flowers, won Best Short Film in the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2016 American Black Film Festival. Her documentary short, Miasia: The Nature of Experience premiered at the 2017 BlackStar Film Festival. She produced the Sundance 2019 documentary short, Black 14, directed by Darius Clark Monroe and executive produced by Spike Lee. Yvonne has directed non-fiction work for New York Times’ T Magazine, Nike, AFROPUNK, and Topic. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list. She is a 2021 Impact Partners Documentary Producing Fellow. In Newark, Yvonne is Director of the Community Media Center at Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art. She is co-founder of The Newarkive, a digital archive initiative centering Newark’s Black communities. She is also a member of the film collective, New Negress Film Society.