Monique Gabriela Curnen is an actor and producer. After graduating from Williams College, Curnen moved to New York City to pursue acting. While there she also interned for Hopkins, Smith, Barden Casting and served as Administrative Director for the Black Filmmaker Foundation. As an actor, Curnen has been in a string of critical and commercial successes including Half Nelson, Maria Full of Grace, The Dark Knight, and Contagion.

As a producer, Curnen produced the interactive short films, Weapons of Misdirection, and Where My Ladies At? for the Black Filmmaker Foundation’s producing lab. Weapons of Misdirection followed the intersecting worlds of an embedded journalist in Iraq, an active duty soldier, and that soldier’s wife awaiting his return in the U.S. The project won the 2005 Webby Award for Best Politics Website. Where My Ladies At? addressed the process of hypersexualizing women of color in hip-hop music videos.

Curnen also produced and directed the short film Absent, which looks at the ripple effects of gun violence. It follows the ritual of a boy visiting the grave of his best friend, finding the only means of connection left to him. Most recently, Curnen completed principal photography on the short film Noel, a story about the intimacy of strangers caught outside an emergency room.