Rich Auntie Ava DuVernay Says She’s Okay With Never Having Kids Or A Husband

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Ava DuVernay is living the rich auntie life and she’s OK with that. The writer/director and producer says that she’s childless and husbandless by choice and is happily living her best life.

Her admission came in an interview with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell in a preview of their new podcast The Unusual Suspects with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell. DuVernay is the subject of the sixth episode of the new podcast which will also feature interviews with retired WNBA star Sue Bird and Maryland governor Wes Moore. She told the duo that after growing up with four younger siblings she had little desire to be a mom. She said the same in a 2022 interview with InStyle.

“I didn’t have kids by choice, and I’m not married by choice,” she said then. “I was able to embrace my career later in life, in my 30s. So I’m going to do what feels good to me, and I’m going to have fun.”

DuVernay started her career by founding her publicity firm at age 27. She moved on from that to become an independent director in 2010 with a movie called I Will Follow starring Omari Hardwick and Salli Richardson. By the time she helmed her second, Middle of Nowhere with Emayatzy Corinealdi and David Oyelewo, she’d drawn the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who hired her to direct Selma.

DuVernay said that she rejects the term workaholic because she loves what she does. “I always resented being called a workaholic because that makes it sound like an addiction of some kind,” she told InStyle. “My work is my heartbeat, and I enjoy doing it, so I always resented it being called something negative.”

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On the podcast, she told Barris and Gladwell that family members told her when she was younger she’d change her mind. But she says she knew she wasn’t going to.

“My family, my mom, would always say, for a little while before she realized I was serious, ‘You’ll change your mind.”

She added, “I don’t feel like I would be a good mother for a child. I don’t want to do that and I think in the most ideal scenario, you should want to do that. I just don’t want to.”

Her mentor, Winfrey felt the same and it worked out pretty well for her. DuVernay is a two-time Emmy, NAACP and BAFTA winner for her film and TV projects including the documentary The 13th, the Netflix series When They See Us, the OWN TV series Queen Sugar and the film Origin, a passion project that won more accolades than viewers given its challenging subject matter.

DuVernay has yet to announce her next project.