Bio excerpt from http://www.laurensgrant.com/ ~  Laurens Grant is a 3-time Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker. She recently directed the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement for BET. She also produced The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, which premiered at Sundance; representing her third film to premiere at this prestigious film festival. The film opened worldwide in Fall 2015 and played a remarkable 8-week run at Film Forum in New York City. It aired on PBS’s Independent Lens series to record-breaking ratings on Feb. 16, 2016. Previously, Grant Directed the documentary Jesse Owens, the first full-length documentary on the African-American sports icon. Jesse Owens won an Emmy for Outstanding Research, and received 2 Emmy nominations for Outstanding Historical - Long Form, and Outstanding Music and Sound. Grant also produced the documentary Freedom Riders which premiered at Sundance, won 3 Primetime Emmys, a Peabody, was featured on Oprah, and has influenced the Hollywood films: Selma and Lee Daniels’ The Butler.    Grant also co-produced two, 4-hour series for PBS, including the Emmy-winning Slavery and the Making of America: Seeds of Destruction, and Latin Music USA: The Chicano Wave.    Before plunging into documentary, Grant was a foreign correspondent in Latin American. She received a Foreign Press Association Award of Merit for her coverage of Latin American politics, finance and women’s rights while working as a journalist for Reuters, Newsweek, the Texas Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, the San Francisco Examiner and other publications.   Grant received a Bachelor of Science in Journalism with a major concentration in French language and literature from Northwestern University the Medill School of Journalism. Grant was also awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters, honoris causa, from Governors State University in Illinois. Grant speaks Spanish and French.