dream hampton

dream hampton has written about music, culture and politics for 20 years. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Village Voice, The Detroit News, Harper's Bazaar, Essence and a dozen anthologies most recently Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson. She was an editor at The Source in the early 90s and a Contributing Writer at Vibe for its first 15 years. She co-authored the unreleased Black Book with Shawn Jay-Z Carter and collaborated with him on Decoded (November, 2010, Spigel and Grau.) She's co-authoring Kamal "Q Tip" Fareed's memoir, Industry Rules (Random House, 2011).

hampton attended NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where she studied film in their undergraduate and Graduate film programs. While a student she filmed her neighbor Chirstopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace for a documentary class. She was an Associate Producer of VH1's Emmy-award winning Behind the Music: Notorious B.I.G. and co-producer of the Peter Spier directed "Bigger than Life", the first feature length documentary on the rapper. Her narrative short film "I AM ALI" was an official entry at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and won "Best Short Film" at Vanity Fair's Newport Film Festival. "I AM ALI" was acquired by director Doug Limon's Hypnotic Films.

A longtime member of the human rights organization Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, hampton helped to organize the Black August Hip Hop Concert Benefit to raise awareness about U.S. political prisoner for ten years. hampton directed The Black August Hip Hop Project, a film about the concert series, political prisoners and MXGM.

dream hampton is from Detroit and lived in Brooklyn and Harlem most of her adult life. She publishes her name in lower case letters as a nod to feminist author bell hooks, an early influence.

More on dream hampton >