Ava DuVernay will be the first black female director to helm a movie with a budget over $100m.

DuVernay will helm the live-action adaptation of the 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time, with Oprah Winfrey slated to star.

The director first made waves in Hollywood with her 2014 film, Selma, a biopic that depicts Dr Martin Luther King during a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

The film industry is largely dominated by white men, and very few women have directed high-budget motion pictures in the past. Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow was the first with her 2002 film, K-19 the Widowmaker. The forthcoming superhero film, Wonder Woman, will be directed by Patty Jenkins.

Before DuVernay, no other women of colour had been attached to films with such high budgets, Women and Hollywood reported.

The Disney-produced A Wrinkle in Time received $18.1m in California state tax credit from the state’s expanded Film & Television Tax Credit programme. Variety reported that the film received the largest tax credit among the other 28 eligible applicants.

The film will be DuVernay’s first foray into a studio “tentpole” production. She made her first film, I Will Follow, in 2011 with only $50,000. Her second film, Middle of Nowhere, cost $500,000. The Oscar-nominated Selma had a relatively low price tag of $20m.

DuVernay has focused much of her behind the scenes work on providing more opportunities for women of colour in film. She launched the distribution company ARRAY in 2010 (then as African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement).

“Our work is dedicated to the amplification of independent films by people of colour and women filmmakers globally,” the company’s website says.

DuVernay directed the upcoming documentary The 13th, set to premiere on Netflix 7 October. The film, about mass incarceration in the US, is named for the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in the nation.

“A certain part of our population has been demonized for the benefit of private industry and politicians, and a lot of forces that have nothing to do with, quote, ‘keeping people safe,’” DuVernay told The New York Times.