Histories and Futures of Black Feminist Film Curation: A Conversation with Ina Archer, Cheryl Chisholm, Monica Freeman, Jennifer Lawson, O.Funmilayo Makarah, and Yvonne Welbon

Before anyone becomes a film curator or a filmmaker, we are all filmgoers. Could you tell us about a formative moviegoing experience or two that helped to set you on your current path? What has stuck with you about those screenings? Was it the images you saw on the screen, who you were with, what was said afterward? We’d love to hear about the films themselves as well as the larger contexts for those filmgoing experiences.

When I was young, I was in Chicago and I was always very curious. I read in the paper that there were going to be some films at one of the museums downtown, and I went to see a film called Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966). I sat there, the only Black person and youngest person in the audience, and it blew me away. I just kept thinking, who did this? How did they do it? How did they show this person? How did they show somebody that looked pretty much like me? What’s going on here? Years later, after graduating with an MFA from UCLA’s film program and working for the Berlin Film Festival, I realized that all those years ago Black Girl was meant for me; it helped me to turn away from a career in medicine to become a proud filmmaker, artist, curator, and organizer who appreciates why it’s important to tell our stories and share them with others!

I grew up in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, and Miles College, a Historically Black College is located just a few blocks from where I grew up. There was an evening when they hosted a screening at Miles, and it was of a film that had been banned elsewhere in Alabama. It was a film about a Black woman who was passing as white and had to deny her heritage and her mother [Imitation of Life, dir. Douglas Sirk, 1959]. The entire community turned out to see it. It was different than going to the segregated theater to see a film. This was an all-Black community screening, the theater was filled with people, and we talked with each other afterward. That’s what I remember so vividly about it. It wasn’t just seeing the film, but it was then having the discussion afterward. And the discussion wasn’t led by someone prompting us to speak. It was just one of those things: people wanted to be together to talk. What it showed me was the power of community. Because this was a time when Birmingham was incredibly segregated, probably around 1961. Usually, you only had that many African Americans congregating in church. It was a fascinating discussion, and we were people of all ages. It was this multigenerational conversation among a community.

I graduated from college in ’67, and I loved film, loved Fellini—Juliet of the Spirits (1965), loved Richard Lester—The Knack…and How to Get It (1965), and a whole bunch of stuff. I went to Europe and was there in spring of ’68. My first hint that it was going to be a rough spring was that Otis Redding died in January. Every café you walked into was playing “[Sittin’ on the] Dock of the Bay.” So I was already in a grieving, confused space. Then while I was in Florence, Dr. King was killed. And then I went to meet some friends in Paris in April of 1968 and [the May uprisings in] Paris took place. In the middle of that, I saw Dutchman, LeRoi Jones’s [film], in London, and then in Paris I saw Story of a Three-Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1968). Okay, these are two Black men. But in terms of my eyes and what I thought might be possible, that was revolutionary. Just to see that. I remember I had been a little scared to see Dutchman, and when it ended, I stood up and shouted. I—ooh—I was ready for that. I didn’t know I was ready for it, but I was ready for it. But still, I didn’t see a place for me in film. I was a book person. I came back to the States. I became an editor. That’s when I started my friendship with Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Childress, Vertamae Grosvenor.

When I was in high school, I would take art classes and go to cultural events for fun. I went to plays at the University of Chicago and screenings and exhibitions at the Art Institute. I remember going to a screening and seeing this film, which now I know is called Deutschland Spiegel (Sharon Couzin, 1980). It was really disjointed. The narrative wasn’t clear, it was a super experimental film. I see it, I love it, and I’m like, oh my God, I would love to do something like that. With writing, it was a collage of storytelling. So fast forward, I’m leaving Taiwan [where Welbon lived for six years after graduating from Vassar College]. I come to the United States for the summer, and I’m at the Art Institute taking both a film class and a video class. In the film class one day, the woman who’s teaching the class shows her films, and it’s that film. So my first film teacher was Sharon Couzin! It was her film Deutschland Spiegel. I had a moment. Like, okay, this is where I’m supposed to be. I didn’t go back to Taiwan. I decided to go to film school.

Jennifer and Monica, you were both participants in the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts in New York City, where you were living at the time and getting a “film education” in both formal and informal ways. Could you tell us about your memories from that general period? What different art scenes did you participate in? What kinds of film training did you seek out? And how did those experience affect your later work?

I lived and worked in Tanzania from 1970 to 1972. The attitude that they had at that time was that if they couldn’t control the media (the narrative and the stories that they were going to be telling) then they didn’t want it in their country. So, they didn’t have television. They had television on the island of Zanzibar, but there was no television on the mainland. It made me think of the importance of communicating and how important media was and that we were going to be left behind. With images of Mississippi and Alabama in mind, I thought that we were going to be left behind if we didn’t use television and film to educate our people. So that led me to come back to the United States and to Columbia University to study film. And that’s where I met Monica Freeman and all of these wonderful people.

When I moved to New York City, I had heard that there was this training program that public television had.⁴ So, I thought I’d apply for it because maybe I wouldn’t get into Columbia, then I could learn film that way. I got into both, so I just did both. I’d go to Columbia during the day and WNET, the public TV station, at night. There was Peggy Jackson, Raquel Ortiz, and a number of other people. We were all interested in media for our people. That was the common denominator.

I kept feeling that it was so important—absolutely essential—that we tell our stories. If we had a story to tell, we should tell it. We should try to make our history as visible as possible. That led me to my studies at Columbia and WNET, and that also led me into a wonderful community through my friendships with Evelyn and Larry Neal and others like Max Bond, Clayton Riley, Vertamae Grosvenor, so many people in that whole New York intellectual scene. We spent weekends going up to the Hudson where Kathy Collins lived, and then there was Pearl Bowser. The wealth of people that I met and was interacting with was just incredible. It was such a rich environment to be a part of.

That made me aware of how big the problems were in terms of the level of exclusion of people of color in this media world. I think that made more of a community of us who were embracing each other in what we were doing. I was delighted when I met Monica—to know that here’s this other person who’s going through the same kind of experience. We began to, without knowing the words, to be champions for each other. We were champions for other women that we would encounter.

I also remember Emily Rothschild and others being very active in screening films by women. There were people like St. Clair Bourne and others who were screening films about African, African American, and Caribbean experience. In Washington, DC, Tony Gittens had created the Black Film Institute, and I was interested enough in his work that I ended up marrying him!

I had similar experiences being in New York City. Madeline Anderson was in New York City, and she was the first Black woman I knew who made a film. Her film I am Somebody (1970) showed the strength and the endurance of Black women against a system that was oppressing them. I didn’t go to NET training school like Jennifer, but I met a man named John Wise and he went there. He taught me what he knew, so I got it through osmosis. I learned filmmaking from the people from NET and making films with John. He was making films on different communities and artists. He made a film on [artist] Benny Andrews, and I said, oh, I could make a film on [artist] Valerie Maynard. We’re making films on men, but who’s making films on women artists? So that’s how I got started being a filmmaker. And when I was at the Studio Museum in Harlem as an intern, I was a programmer there.

In the late ’80s I moved to Atlanta and programmed films for the Atlanta African Film Society for Ed Spriggs, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem where I had interned. Already on the scene was Cheryl Chisholm who was doing an amazing job programming, promoting, and directing the Third World Film Festival.⁵ She became my role model. She brought films and filmmakers from all over the world, including Australia, Great Britain, Africa, and the Caribbean.

[Monica Freeman later shared these additional memories of Cheryl Chisholm]

At the 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival Symposium, we talked. I asked her how she did it [film festival programming] since I never saw a staff. Cheryl told me that one time she had to acquire a 35 mm print that was waiting at customs. She had to find it first, with little time before screenings. She was amazing and miraculously her screenings seemed to go on without a hitch. She was also a talented filmmaker, making a documentary film, On Becoming a Woman (1987). Cheryl was dedicated, smart, and knowledgeable, as she exposed us to the media and media makers of the world. I’m lucky to have had that exposure.

Cheryl—and Yvonne and Ina, who came on the scene later—could you tell us about how you came to film programming and curatorial work? What kinds of formal and informal educational experiences shaped your work, and who were the mentors and fellow travelers who helped you along the way?

Because of the person I married, [television producer] Charles Hobson, I wrote scripts that he was producing for Vegetable Soup.⁶ Remember that PBS show? And I thought, oh yeah, I could do this. And then we moved to DC, and I was a senior editor at Howard University Press. I was really getting interested in film, trying to build a book list on film and visual arts. Carrie (Moore) Sembène wanted to write her memoir of her time in Senegal with Ousmane (Sembène). [Artist] Jeff Donaldson wanted to write a book.

I discovered that [filmmaker] Haile Gerima was there [at Howard]. In typical Haile manner, I called and he said, “We have these Saturday morning theory groups. Come!” I went and immediately was entranced. This is where I first read Paulo Freire, where I started reading the [theory of] the deconstructionists and the neo-Marxists, and where we used to wrestle with Haile around his 16 mm Steenbeck [flatbed editing machine] about what should be in and what should be out. He gave me scripts to read—because he knew I was an editor—to give him notes. I read an early script of Sankofa (Gerima, 1993). [Chisholm gave him lots of notes] It was all kind of scribbles: Why does she have to be naked right here? I helped a little in pre-production for Ashes and Embers (Gerima, 1982). This is when I first got to know Shirikiana Aina [Gerima’s producing partner and wife] And that was the beginning.

But I began to think: Oh, I need to go to film school. And because of all Haile’s stories—and then Charles Burnett would come to town and I would hear his stories. I thought: Oh, I’m going to UCLA and it’s gonna be fabulous. Right? So I went to UCLA film school for theory. This is partly because of Haile and how he got me started, but also because of the particular way my brain works. And I loved it. I was able to study with Teshome Gabriel on Third World Cinema. And as Shirikiana said yesterday, Latin American cinema was very important to me. But I began to see all the Black independent work. I left UCLA, went back to Atlanta where I’m from, and Atlanta Third World Film Festival was looking for a director. I took it on.

So that was the beginning of my programming. But what I realized later when I visited other film festivals, both small ones and big ones, I invented what I thought a film festival was, and it was really curated. It was curated rather than programmed. It had a shape, and I wasn’t sure that the shape manifested to other people. I remember—Monica may remember—there was a couple, a Black middle-class couple, who my first or second year, came to every screening. And I had twenty-eight screenings over the month of March. And I thought: Oh, I love these people because they get to see the shape of the whole thing.

Barbara McCullough said yesterday—she and many people in production said, “Cheryl, what are you doing over there in theory?” And I would explain, “Oh no, all the stuff they’re talking about is exactly what we experience and often can’t articulate in the Black community.” And I wanted to figure out how to translate this so we can use it. So filmmakers can use it in informing their choices about how they make films so they can step outside of the Hollywood framework. So the audience can receive in a different way from how they’re used to.

So one of the things I did besides the regular screenings over a month, I started something called the Film Forum. And what it was, I realized later, was a form of critical media literacy. We would do forums and the idea was to explore all the different ways in different cultures that people have told stories and how those narratives were shaped so that it wasn’t just the Hollywood format.

That was a big part of it for me: those forums beginning to educate the audience in a way that they found very enjoyable. I also programmed the National Black Arts Festival’s film and media work for all those years from around 1987 to 1996. And I programmed the King Center’s nonviolent film festival [in Atlanta]. We were able to do it for three years. Those three festivals led me to teaching at Spelman, teaching at Dillard, doing series all over the country and in Canada. I started going to Canada, getting to know the Canadian Black filmmakers and a wide range of work.

I started film school in 1991 [at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)]. I only knew the name of one African American woman filmmaker, which was Julie Dash. My professors told me I was probably the second one. I knew that cinema had started over a hundred years before, so I didn’t believe them. I knew there had to be others. So I set out on my journey to find my sisters in cinema. Once I started finding the films, I needed to see them. So, my strategy was to become a curator. I volunteered to create programs about Black women filmmakers.

I had come back to Chicago from living in Taiwan for six years and was really disconnected. So, I went back to the South Side of Chicago, to South Shore, which is my neighborhood, and I went to this organization called ETA Creative Arts. We created something called the African American Women in the Arts Festival. From 1991 to 1994, I chaired the film and video committee, and that is the main way I saw films made by Black women. We had an open call. People submitted work. I think we received maybe over a hundred films in that time period.

Around that same time [in the early 1990s], Floyd Webb thought I should meet Julie Dash. So, Julie Dash and I were hanging out, and it was the premiere of her film [Daughters of the Dust] in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center. And mind you, it had just shown at Sundance where it won an award for best photography, but it got really panned by Variety. So, nobody had really seen the film, but Floyd, bless his heart, was like, we gonna show this film. Julie and I get to the Film Center, and there’s a flight of stairs where you have to go up and she doesn’t know if anybody’s coming to see the film. She grabs my hand, and we walk up those stairs together. When we got to the top of the stairs, there was a line wrapped all the way around. It went all the way back. Beautiful Black people—this is in the nineties when everybody had their Afrocentric clothing—woo—it was gorgeous! Everybody’s in their finery. It was a special event. She let my hand go. That was my memory. It was so amazing. She was fine. She was fine. And the rest is history.

I think the very first program I did was with Chicago Filmmakers, which still exists.⁷ I was really interested in experimental filmmakers early on because I went to the School of the Art Institute, which was an experimental film school. I’m a Black lesbian, so that was the first thing I did—I put together a program on Black lesbian experimental filmmakers. That was 1992 and I think it was the first program of its kind. I got involved with Women in the Director’s Chair, which was an organization here in Chicago supporting women filmmakers.⁸ They were great. I met Cheryl [Dunye] because of them. They had an annual festival and that allowed me a space to become a curator and to help with the programming. Eventually, I became a board member. It was also a way for me to meet everybody. So I’m like, “Hey, I’m programming something. I wanna find you. I wanna know who exists. I wanna know you all.” In 1993, Aarin Burch created a panel called Sistah Action at Frameline, which is the largest gay and lesbian film festival. It was the first panel of its kind. It brought queer women of color together. Kind of like the Sojourner Truth Festival [2023], we were all invited. But we were all sleeping on her floor in her house. There was no money. I think it was a long weekend. We just hung out together. We connected, we bonded, we played around San Francisco, went to a whole bunch of events together. And we did this panel. Pratibha Parmar was on that panel. Aarin, Shari Frilot, who’s a programmer at Sundance, Dawn Suggs. It was like the Sojourner Truth Festival, but the pennies version. We were all at Aarin’s house hanging out, cooking our own food. We didn’t have catering. It’s like the early, early, early version of when you’re starting out in your twenties and you’re just trying to get together. That was one of my favorite programs. I met so many people there, and they’re lifelong friends, like Aarin.

I also worked with an organization called Randolph Street Gallery and with the Art Institute [SAIC]. I worked a lot with the [SAIC] visiting artists program because they had a budget. I wanted to meet Camille Billops. They flew her in. I wasn’t getting my education at school. I just wasn’t. So I needed to figure out another way to learn about my history. I had to be a curator if I wanted my education. You go to film school, there are certain films everybody has to watch, and they’re mostly by white men. So, I have a traditional film education, but I needed a whole other education, so I created it myself. This was me getting an education. This was me trying to meet my sisters in cinema.

I got interested in film programming and curation and, really, I should say that I started calling myself a programmer and putting that out in the world. Because I was always making lists, thinking about contextualizing films. It very much grew out of my art pursuits—putting films together, putting them together in gallery spaces, collecting images that seem to tell a story with each other.

I think a lot of the time was spent trying to get my own work into festivals and working around festivals and seeing what wasn’t there. Especially because I worked in video and nontraditional filmmaking, not really fitting into documentary, I wanted to open up what festivals also were showing, and so I would conceive programs of my own. I think one of the biggest things about the idea of programming that is important to me is the idea of talking about film and film history through the lens of Black cinema.

And so, talking about any kind of marginalized films and trying to bring those into the realm. The little bits and pieces that are part of Hollywood that we don’t see: industrial films, of course, home movies, all these other films. My blog that I’ve carried on for a long time is called Continuum Film Blog, and it’s about the interrelatedness of all things media.

Programming can help us start to relay those, so that we don’t drop off nonstandard or different kinds of expression. And when I was at the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, it was a way to preserve films that might not have otherwise been seen in order to do something like say: this is a history of film.

In this context, I also would really like to talk about both Jessie Maple and Pearl Bowser and their work as programmers, especially with 20 West [Theater, Home of Black Cinema] for Jessie Maple.⁹ And thinking about trying to remake and then extend that kind of practice, and certainly Pearl Bowser’s combination of collecting, making, distributing, working with all of you, and having the opportunity at the museum [The National Museum of African American History and Culture] with the Pearl Bowser Collection, to continue to help her with her work.¹⁰ I think that programming and curation are ways to activate archives. I also think film programming and exhibition is key for reconstructing the history of time- and lens-based art and centering Blackness. And access to the multiplicities of storytelling through curation, programming and providing context and access to moving images ultimately empowers Black viewers.

Many of you have deep backgrounds in political and social activism. Can you tell us about that work and its connection to your film curation projects?

My journey started with the civil rights movement. I worked with the organization SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in Lowndes County, Alabama, where we were on a mission to try to get the vote of Black people.¹¹ I realized the importance of getting the word out, and that led to me doing crude figures to create billboards. People were passing on the highways, and they would be able to see the billboards and see what we were trying to do, which was to say: vote and then go home so that you’d be safe.

You had a message that you wanted to get out to the world, and the question was, how are you going to reach people? That, to me, stressed the importance of curating and programming because it’s meaningless if we can’t get our messages out to others. That’s where programming becomes essential.

In the early seventies, I taught at Brooklyn College, and I created courses on Third World cinema and several other courses. I would use the public library to find films, and I would invite filmmakers if they were in the area. We didn’t have a budget to bring people in, so I just invited people. It was interesting to me to see how my classes grew in size and reputation because of the work I was doing. I didn’t know the word “curating” at that time, but that’s what I was doing. I was trying to put together a coherent series and trying to give meaning and context for the works that I was selecting.

I come from an activist family, and so we were always interested in trying to move forward, move other people in the community forward, and education was a big thing. At my house, Dick Gregory and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) were two of our frequent visitors, and marching for equality and getting eggs thrown at us was just part of daily living.

I went to Smith College as an undergrad, and they would always have people come there to perform, but they didn’t bring Black people. So, I started working with the programming committee and worked to get Hugh Masekela, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, the choreographer and dancer Eleo Pomare, and others, to perform not only at Smith, but also in venues in the Five College area and in Springfield, Massachusetts. This was the beginning of my public programming experience as I realized that you can make a change. Just get involved. You don’t even have to announce it, just do it. This way you can help to be part of the change that you would like to see.

Later, when I was at UCLA as a film student, we completed films, but nothing was happening to them. I had been involved in organizing for so long by then that it seemed to me that we needed to organize a film festival and a screening. So that’s what I did.

I went and talked to people—we would get somebody’s garage, invite people to a get together, and we’d show our films. I would also talk to individuals, city agencies, local community centers, schools, colleges and universities to see if they were interested in screening our programs. The Women’s Building [in Los Angeles] was one of my favorite places, and I often taught film workshops there.¹²

When I was at UCLA, [filmmaker] Shirley Clarke was my teacher. She was also my mentor, and I loved her, her work, and her teaching style. She really encouraged us to use the new medium of video. But at that time, all the emphasis was on film, not video. UCLA always had big film screenings at the end of each quarter, but we didn’t have that for video. And again, here I am, the organizer, thinking we gotta do something about this. That’s exactly what I did. I got together with another student—Graham Dent—and we organized video screenings so that the video students could also show their work in a festive way. The video screenings became an integral part of the film and TV department. Shortly after that, I decided to leave UCLA and move to Europe.

After living in Europe and working with the Berlin Film Festival, I returned to Los Angeles and UCLA. Although it was ten years later, I reconnected with friends, made new friends, and once again worked with art and film organizations. I met many dynamic people, including Anne Bray and Michael Nash, who had the wonderful idea of bringing video organizations and video people together in a city dedicated to film. Together with Anne and Michael and other wonderful video people, I founded a group we named LA Freewaves, which is now an international media group. We did video programming, and that’s when I came up with the idea of actually channeling my ideas and becoming a nonprofit media organization for all people, especially for Asian, Black, Latina/o, and Indigenous people. Thus, IN VISIBLE COLORS was born.

The proceedings of many early Black film festivals were not recorded, so the recollections of those who attended are especially vital for remembering those programs. Then, too, festivals are so much more than what is said on the official panels. Can you tell us about some especially memorable film programs that you have organized over the years? We’d love to hear anecdotes! Why were those programs especially meaningful to you and others?

I was programming for the South Florida Black Film Festival, and I decided to bring in African cinema because nobody was bringing African cinema to Miami. First we had a film that people were used to seeing, and then we made the second screening free. There’re all these older ladies—now we’re the older ladies—and they said, oh, African film. I said, “Well, it’s free. Just stay. See.” They said, “Well, I don’t know—it has subtitles…” “Just stay.” And they stayed. They watched the African films. It reminded them of their relatives and people from down South and they became fans. I was glad to introduce them to African cinema.

The Atlanta Film Society had the Hoyt Fuller Film Festival once a year. We would have a filmmaker who’d never shown their film in the Atlanta area. There was always somebody every year, and we’d fly them in and put them up. After a while, you get a reputation.

We weren’t the first to do it, but there was something called a movie mobile where you actually bring the films to the people. The movie mobile was something that we would do each summer [in Atlanta]. Originally, we would go to different summer camps in town, and we would bring different films like Picking Tribes [S. Pearl Sharp, 1988]. Then the funding sources said, “Well, you should spread this out.” So, we started doing things for adults. We would do a movie mobile where we would go to Piedmont Park and show a film for free outdoors. We did it with Daughters of the Dust and that was very popular. With the movie mobile in Piedmont Park, people would picnic—all ages, families, young people, everybody would come. But whenever we did a movie mobile inside a neighborhood like a housing project, then we’d get just the youth. We also started going into community centers that the elders, I guess that’s people my age now, but the older people, would come to in the summers and we would bring them the films. Not necessarily films that we thought would be for elders, but films, the regular films we were showing, and they loved it. It’s work they’d never seen because they never came out to our festivals. So that was good to connect with older folks and get them to know that there’s Black independent work that they would like.

I was thinking of how important learning to organize is and how fortunate I feel that I had experience in the civil rights movement as an organizer. Because organizing is producing. It’s going from zero, from nothing, and then saying, oh, the world really needs this. And then thinking of how you will make that happen.

When I was in New York with the Film Fund saying that we need these independent works to be shown more widely. And then thinking, well, at that time the biggest game in town was the New York Film Festival. So having the audacity to say, well, let’s go talk to them. Let’s go talk to Joanne Koch and the people there about showing these films there. Rather than trying to organize our own, we went, we had the conversation, and fortunately we did end up having a showcase of independent films. That then led to people saying, oh, we need a market, so it took off and developed a life of its own. This was before there was Sundance and as many other venues as there are now for independent films. I think it’s, again, looking at what’s missing and then trying to create that. I used the same process when I was involved in independent public television.

From my experience with the Film Fund, I ended up becoming known to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB], and that allowed me to do programming on a much, much larger scale. It was not only just programming, but also grantmaking, which then gave me the opportunity to help many other filmmakers. So, groups like the National Black Programming Consortium—that’s now Black Public Media—and many other groups we were able to support and assist.¹³

Another one of my programming experiences was when I was the general manager of the Howard University television station. We wanted to have much more community involvement there. One of the first things is to have an audience: you have to connect to people, you have to promote. It’s organizing, again, you have to get the word out to people. Having a TV station was fortunate because you have your own air that you can then promote on. But we also wanted to try to reach people who were not watching the station, so we had to come up with other ways of reaching them. In some cases, we were going back to things that I did when I was in the civil rights movement, where we’d go to popular corners in the community in the middle of the hood where we knew people would be coming in and out of grocery stores and hand out flyers. And just say, be sure and tune in or come to this. Having a gathering, a reception afterwards, was another way. Inviting people into the space and then having a discussion afterwards made the TV station a much more personal space. A reception didn’t have to be costly–it wasn’t wine and cheese. We could have a small reception and that made it much more of a community setting. Then by word of mouth, you get people attending others.

Here are two of my favorite programming memories: After I founded IN VISIBLE COLORS, I organized classes at a local LA high school to teach students how to tell stories with video. The program did two things: it taught students how to make videos, and it arranged for filmmakers to visit the students and share their work. Renowned filmmaker Arlene Bowman was one of the invited filmmakers. She screened her extraordinary films, including Navajo Talking Picture (1985) and Song Journey (1994). The students, who were Black and Latina/o, were blown away by this work. As the credits began to roll for the final film, Song Journey, Arlene, who was sitting in the back of the room, started singing as she rose and walked to the front of the room. The students went wild! They loved it and they loved her. Needless to say, she was one of their favorite filmmakers.

On another occasion, I worked with the students and asked them what they would like to make a group project about. After much discussion, they decided they wanted to make a film about prostitution. Although they felt that it really affected their community, they also felt that it was a story that should be told in a way that allowed the women involved to be heard. Together we worked hard to figure out how to get the story out without exposing the women. I must say, I was very proud of the finished product, which did not embarrass or expose the women who were in the video. The students truly understood the need to protect the women while getting the information about their lives out. The best part about the making of this film is that it screened at the school and we did not receive even one negative comment. Those students did an excellent job!

A screening that meant a lot to me was in the early nineties; Floyd Webb started the Black Light Film Festival. I had never been to screenings like that. There were all of these audience members who were really knowledgeable about Black film history. Black Light became Black Harvest and I was on the original committee with Zeinabu [irene Davis], Jackie Stewart, Sergio Mims, and Terry Glover.¹⁴ It was being at Black Light where I saw how if you have a festival going on, you’re building a knowledge base. Film audiences are familiar with these films.

In doing Black Harvest, we noticed there’s a parallel film industry, a Black film world happening in Chicago with people who didn’t go to the film schools. They’re not part of that scene. They are very [Oscar] Micheaux-esque. They’re out here, they’re making their movies, they’re putting them online, they’re getting them seen, but they’re not studied by scholars. So, they don’t become part of any kind of popular culture, although they’re probably the most popular in our culture. For example, here in Chicago, there’s Coquie Hughes, who has created a whole genre of moviemaking, which is lesbian urban drama. She has made more feature films than any Black woman in the world! She’s kinda like Oscar Micheaux. She literally created a genre. There’s all of these urban Black lesbian films now. So there’s this whole alternative Black film scene, which is really big in Chicago.

In 2008, I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, to teach at Bennett College for Women, which is a Historically Black college. I didn’t realize at the time that most Historically Black colleges did not have any kind of LGBT organizing. I was the only out Black lesbian professor at an HBCU at that time. While I was at Bennett, I was a producer of a film called The New Black (Yoruba Richen), and I also headed up the impact campaign. The New Black came out in 2013, so this is before marriage equality, and it looks at how the African American community was grappling with gay rights. That was not happening at Historically Black colleges at all. It was not safe to be gay. It was not safe to be out. People would not go to gay programming on campus because they could lose their funding, they could lose their access to scholarships. They could lose their access to internships if someone found out they were gay. So, we raised money and launched a campaign to actually show this gay film on HBCU campuses. We raised maybe $30,000. And we had a whole bunch of stipulations. For instance, if you won the money, your school had to write a press release and put it out into the world. You also had to work with a community organization that was outside of your campus so that people on campus could learn that there were resources outside the campus.

This was in 2015. For most schools, it was their first LGBT programming on campus. It brought out audiences in a different way. People made t-shirts, people did all kinds of things to draw audience members in. It’s using the film to build an audience and to create a sense of safety in a community. So it was a big campaign. I think we did about a dozen campuses. We helped them do everything; we had a toolkit on how to set up the screening and invite people and what to say at the beginning, because it was all new, and how to deal with issues that might come up. Then we partnered with HRC [Human Rights Campaign], and we partnered with some national organizations to provide support to the students who were on campus. It was a different way of building an audience.

If we think about feminist investments in curation, there is—without being essentialist—often an aspect of caregiving, including women caring for one another and for the work. It’s often necessary to create new conditions to accommodate that approach, and much of that kind of labor often goes on behind the scenes. In short, as film curators, and specifically as Black women film curators, you clearly have all had to wear a lot of hats. Can you tell us more about what has gone into putting together the kinds of programs that you have? What have been the pleasures and the challenges of this work?

My mom moved to Maryland, and as her health declined, I ended up giving it all up—including discontinuing work on my PhD, even though I had passed my exams—and coming to Maryland. So, there I was in Maryland, and I’m still trying to get stuff done, but being with her was taking up more and more time. I missed my friends. I missed LA so much. I missed making films. I missed all of that. I was trying to think of how I could continue what I was doing and not go crazy. I came upon the idea of maybe setting up a film festival. One thing about doing a film festival, I could do so much of it on the phone instead of having to be out, so I could still be with my mom and take care of the family’s needs.

I’ve been running that film festival in Maryland, called the Heritage Film Festival, for a long time [eighteen years].¹⁵ We invite people to show their work—all types of short films. We reach out to people. It’s a community-based festival that encourages people. But every year I’ve looked for films by women, and every year, I get so many more things from men–they love sending in their work. The whole idea of getting Black women who are directors to promote their work and let us help them promote their work is a real challenge.

I also want people to listen to this and not do what I did: I’ve been running film festivals and doing things like that for years, and it wasn’t until last year that it occurred to me that I had never gotten paid to do it. I write successful proposals, and I get money and contributions for events and for people who work with me. A lot of stuff is in-kind: local organizations, restaurants and grocery stores provide outstanding refreshments, venues, and things like that. That’s all very nice. But I never thought about getting myself paid. Don’t do that! I was enjoying what I was doing, and I thought I was doing a good thing for the community, but I’m sorry that it never occurred to me that I also need to get paid!

In 1977, I became the director of the Film Fund and I was able to give grants to independent filmmakers. That was an incredible experience. It meant I was raising the money, and that led me all across the country. It enabled me to meet the filmmakers on the West Coast, like Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Larry Clark.

I worked with Sandra Schulberg and Marc Weiss, who later became the founder and executive director of the TV series POV. We created the first independent feature festival at Lincoln Center, and the independent feature market grew out of that. And we talked about trying to start a distribution company, a distribution collaborative, which never really got off the ground. As now, the market was always just changing so dramatically. So, it was like trying to walk on quicksand.

I was very pleased with the development of groups like Women in Film and Video, both West Coast, East Coast, Washington, DC—all of these groups that helped to nurture women. And even independent of those groups of formal organizations, there were just very supportive women who worked together to try to help make a film or to get a film distributed. And that was sort of the sisterhood of us.

When I became the head of programming at PBS in 1989, I suddenly was seeing works from all over the world and had the ability to direct some of the energy toward specific series, with a strong emphasis on trying to ensure that women and people of color would be foremost. It was still that real challenge of people just getting the money to do a work even with organizations that were very supportive such as the National Black Programming Consortium that is now Black Public Media.

As head of programming, I also realized that sometimes you make compromises. You can take on greater responsibility and authority, and it allows you to open more and bigger doors for other people. But it means you are opening them for other people and not for yourself in that sense. That was absolutely fine with me. But I also learned that the reverse is true. That if something goes wrong, that you then get the blame or you take it. An example of that, around that time, Marlon Riggs made the film Tongues Untied (1989) at the same time that the conservatives—similar to today—were really trying to destroy public broadcasting, and that film became a lightning rod for it. I then found myself in the position as head of programming, as the chief programmer, taking responsibility in defending having put Tongues Untied on air, and that was something that I was proud to do and continued to stand up for films like that.

I have two little stories. One is that I was serious as a heart attack and I think it’s why people liked my proposals when I was raising money. I was really trying to build the audience beyond, oh, what Marxists would call the petite bourgeoisie—the artist, the activists, the intellects. Us, right? I really wanted the folks to come.

So one of the things that I thought was just brilliant—and now this is way, way, way predigital—is I would do beautiful posters for Third World Film Festival, which if you ran into them, you would probably say, “Ooh, that looks interesting.” That was not working for the other folks I wanted, so guess what I did?

Do you all remember the old “hot type” [hot metal typeset] posters? Looked like rainbow colors, pastel rainbow colors. I know they would do them in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. They were always done for blues clubs and gospel shows. I said we gonna do some of those old style posters for Third World Film Festival. We did one for Euzhan Palcy when we brought her to do Sugar Cane Alley (1983). And there she is with her braids and her camera on the “hot type” poster, and we are saying, come see Sugar Cane Alley. I wish I could tell you that it made all the difference. It did not.

I’m sure those of you who have tried to build the audience beyond us know. People can deny the class system all they want, but just try to build something where you bring together classes that aren’t usually together. Ha. It is extremely hard. And there were a couple of things where I really did build a more grassroots audience, and then the petite bourgeoise did not come. And I thought, oh, this is really a problem. I guess I started out really naïve about that. I thought that I’m going to bring everyone together in this space, and it’s going to be amazing. Rarely did that happen.

For sixteen years I was hustling hard. As a freelance curator and programmer—and most of that money came one way or another through Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities]—my fee as a curator would be coming out of those grants. At that point, all that money started drying up [in the 1990s]. I was saying, oh, am I going to be able to continue doing this? I had been thinking for years about becoming a therapist, and that’s when I started saying, okay, seriously, I think you need to switch over. At that point, the very tenuous income that I had been earning for sixteen years started evaporating because of the pressure on CPB, NEA, NEH, all of those organizations.

Streaming, especially during the pandemic, opened up a way to get programs out to people in a way that I hope will be continued while helping to serve building programming and accessibility. To be able to have the work [collected at museums and archives] be presented digitally so that people get a taste of what’s out there and at their discretion. So that it can point back to being able to have archival screenings, these more kind of bespoke situations that I think people would enjoy if they knew what they were. These films are there and they’re not being gatekept by institutions.

I’ve created my own dream programming project by creating a whole Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Center that has a theater that can show Black women’s work 24/7. It’s a tiny theater, but you’ll be able to see Black women’s work on the South Side of Chicago all the time. Then we have a video gallery. So, there’s a place in this world where you’ll always be able to see the work of Black women media makers. It’s been a journey, but it allows me to formalize a project that I’ve been working on since 1991 into a thing, into an institution.

We got our first grant in 2018 for the Black Lesbian Writers Room. We currently have six programs, including the Documentary Fellows Program, a screening series, Sister Social for Black women and gender nonconforming media makers, and Sisters in Cinema Productions. The Media Arts Center is for the whole community. Even though some of the programming is specifically for Black women and gender nonconforming media makers, most of the programming at the Center will be for the community.

When I was in film school, we were studying the French New Wave, and they created everything. They created their journals, they created their programming, they created a whole new genre. And that’s what gave me the idea that I could too, because they did it. We just have to make up what we need. So that was a great model. So I did learn something in film school!