Sacha Jenkins, a celebrated hip-hop journalist and documentary filmmaker who produced films about artists including Wu-Tang Clan, Rick James, Biz Markie, Louis Armstrong, and Cypress Hill, has died at the age of 53. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jenkins died at home on Friday morning due to complications from multiple system atrophy, a rare and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. In a post shared to Instagram, Jenkins’ wife and fellow filmmaker Raquel Cepeda and stepdaughter Djali Brown-Cepeda asked fans to respect their family’s privacy as they find the opportunity to make a formal announcement. The Philadelphia native’s creative career stretched back to his teens, when he published Graphic Scenes & Xplicit Language, one of the first zines dedicated to graffiti art, and the widely read hip-hop newspaper Beat Down shortly thereafter. Beat Down later morphed into Ego Trip, a magazine Jenkins co-founded in 1994. Throughout his illustrious career, the Emmy nominee also wrote and produced several documentaries, worked for several major music magazines, and worked with artists like Eminem and 50 Cent. In 2019, Jenkins wrote a piece for The Daily Beast about “real-life rap superheroes” Wu-Tang Clan. More recently, he created the documentary series Everything’s Gonna Be All White for Showtime. He is survived by his wife Raquel, their son Marceau, and his stepdaughter Djali.
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