ABOUT GEORGE ALEXANDER

Prior to pursuing his writing and producing dreams, producer, writer and journalist George Alexander was a media and entertainment banker in New York City. George recently completed a season as the supervising producer on the Centric/BET Networks show Leading Women, a biography show on outstanding African American women including Dr. Maya Angelou, India.Arie, Fantasia, Toni Braxton, Susan Taylor, Iman, among others. George earned a 2010 NAACP Image Award nomination for the show’s episodes on Dr. Angelou and India.Arie; he had the privilege of interviewing Oprah Winfrey one-on-one for Dr. Angelou’s episode.

A former editor-at-large at Black Enterprise magazine, in addition to Black Enterprise and BlackEnterprise.com, George has also written for The Huffington Post, AOL, Daily Variety, VH1, The Biography Channel, Essence, Ebony, HBO.com, Forbes Special Interest, American Legacy, Playthings, and Savoy.

George wrote the January 2008 cover story for Black Enterprise entitled Why Barack Obama Should Be President. For the piece, George interviewed then Senator Obama, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, former Virginia Governor and now Mayor of Richmond L. Douglas Wilder, Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile, John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, political scientists, among others. Additionally, George attended and covered both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2008. His cover story, Yes We Must!, on the historic 2008 presidential election, appeared in the November 2008 issue of Black Enterprise.

For Black Enterprise, George also wrote a cover story on the radio industry for the August 2008 issue for which he interviewed radio greats Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Wendy Williams, Michael Baisden, Radio One president and CEO Alfred Liggins III, among others.

In 2007 he wrote The Biography Channel’s Oscar countdown show Race to the Red Carpet. The special looks back at the year 2006 at the movies and features biographical sketches of the Academy Award nominees for 2007 including Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson, Alan Arkin, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Eddie Murphy.

George is the co-author of the Essence magazine bestseller Queens: Portraits of Black Women and their Fabulous Hair (Doubleday, November 2005) with photographer Michael Cunningham who co-authored the bestseller Crowns. Queens is a photo essay book of Black women from around the world, including England, Ghana, and Seychelles, discussing their personal hair stories. The book was featured in numerous publications across the country including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Miami Herald, Women’s Wear Daily, The Mobile Register, Ebony, and Essence, and on National Public Radio, Good Day Atlanta, and Life & Times on KCET Los Angeles. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC ran a well-received exhibit of photographs and essays from Queens in 2006. A second exhibit of Queens ran at the Cabarrus Arts Council Galleries in Concord, NC in spring 2007.

His first book, the celebrated Essence magazine bestseller Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema, was published by Doubleday Harlem Moon. The first of its kind, Why We Make Movies is a collection of interviews with thirty-three outstanding African-American directors and producers including Spike Lee, John Singleton, Melvin Van Peebles, Julie Dash, Gordon Parks, Ossie Davis, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Warrington Hudlin, Reginald Hudlin, St. Clair Bourne and Euzhan Palcy. Harvard University has used Why We Make Movies in a class taught by renowned film critic Elvis Mitchell.

George was the co-writer of the VH1 special series Black in the 80s. The three-part series examines and celebrates the impact of Black popular culture---from The Cosby Show to Oprah to Spike Lee to hip hop and R&B---on mainstream culture during the 1980s. The series premiered in February 2005.

Presently, George is collaborating with international deejay and former Snoop Dog opening act and road manager DJ Spin Easy, a.k.a. Corey Mayes, on the book My Life is a Paid Vacation. The book will be part travel memoir, part adventure tome and part slice of life observations on culture, race, politics, and the universal power of music and friendship as told to George by Mayes who has traveled as a deejay to more than forty countries making him one of the most sought-after deejays in the world today.

A film and pop culture critic, George has appeared on VH1, TV One, NPR, AMC, Fox Business, BET, CNN radio, and MTV radio. He has also lectured, moderated or served on panels at conferences, film festivals, colleges, and museums across the country including, the Chicago International Film Festival, the Independent Feature Project, the Urbanworld Vibe Film Festival, the Hollywood Black Film Festival, the Pan African Film Festival, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, California State University, DePaul University, Dillard University, Morehouse College, the American Museum of Natural History, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Newark Museum. George also wrote, directed, and produced, Two Years Later, a fifteen-minute dramatic short film, which was screened at Lincoln Center by the Black Filmmaker Foundation.

Before pursuing writing, George served as a vice president at Westpac Banking Corporation in New York. After banking, he spent four months in Paris where he wrote comedy sketches, studied classic American films, and completed immersion French studies.

In 2001, George was selected for membership in the British-American Project (BAP) and invited to attend the organization’s annual conference in Oxford, England. Sponsored by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, BAP is a competitive invitation-only fellowship of American and British leaders and opinion makers from such diverse fields as the media, business, education, government, the arts, and medicine. He sits on the boards of the Vineyard Theatre, which produced the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit musical Avenue Q, the Friends of Harlem Hospital, and the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center. George is a former board member of Harlem Stage, the performing arts center at City College of New York. George also enjoys going to the movies, foreign travel, long-distance running, downhill skiing and listening to live music. A native of Mobile, AL, George is a graduate of Morehouse College and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

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