I've been writing scripts all the time, pretty much every day for fourteen years.... I have to write scripts, because that's the only way I can write parts that will get a lot of people whom I really want to work with involved.
In 1979, Lemmons made her acting debut in the television movie 11th Victim (1979). She performed with the Boston Children's Theater and later attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts but transferred to UCLA to major in history. She eventually left UCLA and enrolled in the film program at the New School for Social Research. As a young child, she got her first role on TV on a local soap opera called You Got a Right, a courtroom drama. She played the first and only black girl who integrated to an all-white school. Her acting credits include episodic parts on shows like As the World Turns, Murder, She Wrote, The Cosby Show or ER and films such as Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), Vampire's Kiss (1988), the Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), Hard Target (1993), Fear of a Black Hat (1993), Gridlock'd (1997) and 'Til There Was You (1997).
Lemmons has been married to actor and Director Vondie Curtis-Hall since 1995. The couple have two children.
In 1997, Lemmons directed the film Eve's Bayou starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Diahann Carroll, and Jurnee Smollett. The film was well-received among critics (currently holding an 80% rate of approval on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes) and won Lemmons an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature as well as a National Board of Review award for Outstanding Directorial Debut.
In 2001 she directed Jackson again in The Caveman's Valentine about a schizophrenic homeless man trying to solve a murder mystery. In 2002 Lemmons conceived and helmed the tribute to Sidney Poitier for the 74th Annual Academy Award show. Shortly afterwards it was announced that Lemmons would direct The Battle of Cloverfield, a supernatural thriller, from her own script for Columbia Pictures. In 2007, she directed Talk to Me (2007) about an ex-con (played by Don Cheadle) who became a popular talk show host and community Activist. Lemmons specifically wanted Don Cheadle in her movie. She felt Martin Sheen would be fitting to play E.G. Sonderling, head of the radio station. The film and the actors were praised and Lemmons received an Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture.
Lemmons adapted the Broadway musical Black Nativity and filmed it in 2013. It starred Academy Award winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson, as well as Academy Award nominee Angela Bassett.
