A Howard Student Is Turning Her Eating Disorder Into A Film Black Women Can’t Ignore

It’s late spring semester at Howard University, and inside a rented Airbnb, a group of young Black creatives are locked in. Their cameras are up and the lights are hot. Someone is adjusting a plate of food for the fifth time. At the center of it all is 21-year-old Na’vaeh Dudley, directing a story that didn’t come from theory or imagination, but from something far more intimate.

Her own life.

Her short film, Consumption, is about isolation and the complicated, often invisible relationship between food and emotions. But what makes the project hit differently is that it centers an experience that is rarely talked about in Black communities—eating disorders.

Na’vaeh knows exactly how that silence works.

“Consumption really explores how isolation can consume us,” she says. “And how connection can sometimes interrupt that cycle.”

For decades, eating disorders have been framed as an issue affecting white girls and women. The image is familiar: thin, affluent, and suburban. But that framing has always been incomplete and harmful because Black girls and young women have been dealing with disordered eating, too. They’ve just been overlooked.

Research shows that Black adolescents and teenage girls are 50% more likely to engage in bulimic behaviors than their white peers. At the same time, they are far less likely to be diagnosed or receive treatment. That disconnect between who is struggling and who gets recognized has created a quiet crisis, and that’s the gap Na’vaeh is stepping into.

In Consumption, the main character Nori lives inside a carefully controlled world. Every moment is scheduled, all her habits are intentional, and every bite is measured. But when her environment begins to shift through the presence of her roommate, disrupted routines, and human connection, those patterns start to break.

Lead actress Shierra King carries that weight with almost no dialogue. In one scene, she picks at a plate of lasagna. Her movements are small but loaded with tension. It took nearly five hours of shooting take after take to get that moment right. Because for Na’vaeh, the goal wasn’t just to tell a story. It was to make people feel something they might not have language for.

And that matters, especially when you look at how eating disorders show up in Black communities. Cultural norms around food, body image, and community can mask harmful patterns, making it harder for people to even recognize what they’re experiencing. In some spaces, eating more is normalized. In others, control is praised. In many cases, the line between coping and harm gets blurred. That’s the reality Consumption is trying to capture.

Na’vaeh’s connection to the story deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when isolation became a global experience but hit differently depending on who you were and what you were carrying.

“During COVID, people couldn’t even go within six feet of each other,” she says. “Connection, friendship, empathy, that’s what people needed.”

For her, the absence of that connection made everything more intense and quieter. Filmmaking became a way to process that. But even bringing the project to life came with its own challenges.

It’s a heavy film season at Howard, with MFA students shooting thesis projects and crews spread thin. So Na’vaeh had to build her team from the ground up by posting casting calls, reaching out in DMV film group chats, and pulling in friends and collaborators wherever she could find them.

This isn’t just about one film. It’s about what happens when Black women start telling stories that have historically been erased, dismissed, or misunderstood.

Nearly 30 million people in the United States will experience an eating disorder in their lifetime. Rates have more than doubled globally in recent decades. But the face of that data is still overwhelmingly portrayed as white, which leaves Black girls and women navigating these experiences without visibility, resources, or recognition.

Na’vaeh is pushing against that. Not with statistics, but with story. Her film doesn’t offer a clean resolution. There’s no dramatic breakthrough moment, or instant healing because that’s not how it works.

“Cures aren’t instantaneous,” she says. “Sometimes the best thing you can do is take a step toward healing.”

That honesty is what makes the project land. It doesn’t try to fix the problem. It names it. For many people watching, especially those who have never seen themselves reflected in conversations about eating disorders, that alone is powerful.

Na’vaeh Dudley is part of a generation of young Black women who are done waiting for their experiences to be validated by mainstream narratives, and so they are documenting them and turning them into something that can be seen, heard, and felt.

Sometimes the first step toward healing isn’t solving anything. It’s finally being able to say, “This is happening” and  knowing you’re not the only one.

Kannon Trowell is a journalism major at Howard University. She is interested in entertainment reporting. You can follow her on LinkedIn.

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