Rachel Morrison

Rachel Morrison is a cinematographer known for Mudbound, Black Panther and Fruitvale Station. For her work on 2017's Mudbound Morrison was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematographer, becoming the first woman to ever be nominated in that category.

Morrison took up photography at a young age. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Concord Academy in 1996. She then attended New York University, where she completed a double major in film and photography since she was unable to choose between the two disciplines; by the end of her degree, she had decided to concentrate on cinematography. She then attended the AFI Conservatory's graduate cinematography program and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 2006. She began her career in television, working on series and telefilms for a number of networks. Her cinematography on the 2005 television documentary Rikers High, which was about high school education within the Rikers Island prison complex, was nominated for an Emmy Award.

The 2007 independent film Palo Alto marked Morrison's debut as the primary cinematographer on a feature film, after which she took a job as director of photography on the MTV reality series "The Hills." She worked on "The Hills" for two years before moving to features, beginning with Zal Batmanglij's Sound of My Voice, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Over the next two years, she photographed Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie and Fruitvale Station, which premiered at Sundance in 2012 and 2013 respectively, as well as Any Day Now, Some Girl(s) and The Harvest. In 2014, she photographed Cake, directed by Daniel Barnz, which she followed up with the 2015 film Dope. Dope premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, making it Morrison's seventh film to screen at the annual festival in six consecutive years.

2014 marked Morrison's first foray into directing, as she was offered the chance to direct an episode of the television series American Crime, which aired in 2015. In 2017, she became a member of the American Society of Cinematographers. She was the cinematographer for Ryan Coogler's 2018 film Black Panther.