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. From 2005 to late 2009, she served as oral historian and documentary educator for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

For the past few years, April has been working in experimental film and video, and in 2007 she completed “Another Word for Family,” an experimental documentary about her hometown in the Mississippi Delta. In 2009 she earned a Master of Fine Art (MFA) in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, where her graduate project was a film-based installation on the legacy of the cotton industry in the United States.

Since August 2008, April and her family have been based in Vancouver, BC, although she tries to spend as much time in Mississippi as possible.

Her short films have shown in film festivals in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and South America.