Zola director Janicza Bravo signs on for FX's Kindred, which has found its star in newcomer Mallori Johnson

Deadline

Bravo will executive produce and direct the pilot for the TV series adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s influential novel. Johnson will play the central character Dana, "a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has uprooted her life of familial obligation and relocated to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own," per Deadline. "But, before she can get settled into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a nineteenth-century plantation with which she and her family are most surprisingly and intimately linked. An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind." Bravo said of joining Kindred: “I first read Kindred 20 years ago. I was in college. I hadn’t ever seen myself in a world like that. And certainly not at its center.."