23 May Louis Massiah Joining MIT Open Documentary Lab as an MLK Visiting Scholar
We are pleased to announce that Louis Massiah SM’82 will join the lab as an MIT MLK Visiting Scholar in 2023. Massiah is an award-winning documentarian and the director/ founder of Scribe Video Center, a community-based media organization. He has devoted the past forty years to training, supporting, and empowering generations of BIPOC filmmakers and is a 1996 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Massiah is an alumnus of MIT’s Film/Video Section – where he studied with filmmakers Ricky Leacock and Ed Pincus and media artist Benjamin Bergery.
Massiah returned to his home city of Philadelphia immediately after completing his degree; he founded Scribe specifically in order to spread the knowledge he gained at MIT to members of his predominantly working-class and African American community, using the model of the local, publicly accessible, media arts center. Since then, Scribe has been at the forefront of community-focused media education, production, and storytelling practices that have only recently been recognized by the larger documentary field under the framework of “Co-Creation.” Scribe’s achievements are impressive by every measure. Since its founding, “thousands of people and over two hundred and fifty community groups have documented their hopes, dreams, passions, and concerns in some 350 videos. Many of these works represent visions, perspectives and understandings that have not been voiced or seen in any other media, and all of them represent sparks of creativity and daring for the filmmakers.”
Even while directing the work of Scribe Video Center, Massiah has produced his own vital and compelling body of documentary films, including The Bombing of Osage Avenue; W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (co-written by Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis); A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown; and two episodes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II. Massiah has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Temple University, Princeton University and New York University and held appointments as a visiting artist at U. Penn and Howard University.
While at ODL, he will work on several projects including a platform for a consortium of local media organizations to create and share community-based news on a national scale and another one that uses public screens in Philadelphia’s public transport system. He will explore co-creation methodologies, teach classes and engage with faculty and students across the institute.