Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, April grew up in the era following integration of public schools, the daughter of a public school superintendent. That situation shaped her profoundly and led to a deep-rooted interest in matters of race, history, and ideas of redemption and reconciliation. A graduate of Millsaps College, she left the South for 10 years, most of which she spent in Seattle, as well as on travels in Europe, North America, and Asia. She completed a program in Documentary Video at the University of Washington in 1996 and began making short documentaries, primarily in partnership with Heather McRae-Woolf.
In 2001, April and her husband moved to Mississippi, where she worked on several films and television documentaries, including the PBS series “The Blues,” with directors Wim Wenders, Sam Pollard, and Charles Burnett, and “The Murder of Emmett Till” by Stanley Nelson.
In 2004, April directed “The Children Shall Lead,” a short documentary about the Freedom Riders. Since 2005, she has served as oral historian and documentary educator for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Most recently, April has been working in experimental film and video as a low-residency MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 she completed “Another Word for Family,” an experimental documentary about her hometown in the Mississippi Delta. Her short films have shown in film festivals in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa.