Documentary movie making is a form of knowledge sharing and also a tool for community building. The way we organize ourselves to create a film can be as powerful a force as the knowledge presented within the movie. Please join documentary filmmaker and educator Louis Massiah for a talk on the possibilities of documentary as a tool for community cultural work, exploring the traditions and methodologies of independent community-based digital media making.

Louis J. Massiah SM '82 is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media has earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996-2001), two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Through Scribe, he assists emerging filmmakers in authoring their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History Project, Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, and The Great Migration - A City Transformed. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (1996), two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series (1987), A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002), and The Interrogative Portrait series: How to Make A Flower: La Méthode MOBO (2020), What I See: Don Camp (2021), and most recently, Why Black Film? – A Conversation with Pearl Bowser (2023) have screened at festivals, galleries, and museums throughout the U.S., Europe, and Africa, and broadcast on public television. In 2011, Massiah was commissioned to create a five-channel permanent video installation for the National Park Service’s President’s House historic site. Other projects include video installations for The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a Nation and the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar, Senegal. Massiah is the project director and co-programmer of We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media. He holds a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT.

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