At the 2025 Independent Spirit Awards, Justin Simien took home the award for Best New Non-Scripted or Documentary Series for Hollywood Black. He used his acceptance speech to call out the “white nationalist coup taking over this country.” And that moment of speaking truth to power was a powerful reminder that whether in front of a laptop, behind a camera, or on stage, Simien is going to make his voice heard, and ensure that yours is too. Simien became one of the filmmakers to watch when his film Dear White People won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. The same film, which followed Black students and the escalating racial tensions at a fictional Ivy League university, became the springboard for the Netflix series of the same name, premiering in 2017 to critical acclaim. By 2019, he launched his production company Culture Machine, which has gone on to produce content like Dear White People, Hulu’s Bad Hair, the podcast Don’t @ Me, the docuseries Loud and Proud, and the award-winning documentary Hollywood Black. This is what we call flipping the script.