Carla LynDale Bishop (MIT & Black Public Media Fellow 2020-2021) is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in Digital Storytelling at The University of Oklahoma. She is the inaugural recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and sponsored by MIT Center for Art, Science, & Technology (CAST). She received her BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Chicago and her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2013, she founded, Focused.Arts.Media.Education., an organization that trains youth how to make media that matters in their communities through in-school residencies, summer workshops and community-wide documentary projects.
Her work explores ways that media can be used to bring communities together and promote social change. Whether through an outdoor community screening or a documentary presentation produced by local youth, her work brings people together, sparks dialogue, and affirms the stories and legacies of those often left out of mainstream media. She is equally an educator and filmmaker, often finding ways to blend film instruction with community production through service-learning opportunities for students. In her courses, she teaches students how to view media as a form of service, of giving back, and creating media that matters whether it’s to entertain, educate, document, or inspire.
Her most recent projects, Freedman Town 2.0 and Voices of the Hill, center around documenting historically black communities using co-creation and new media technologies. She uses documentary production and training as a way to preserve, celebrate, honor and document the histories and stories in these communities. Her work has been featured in film festivals, conferences, and community events across the country.
While at ODL, she is producing an immersive geo-locative media project titled, “Mapping Blackness”. This digital mapping platform chronicles historically black communities that are often left off of maps utilizing geotagging, Augmented Reality, 360 video, data visualization and traditional documentary storytelling. “Mapping Blackness” is a continuation of previous projects and aims to put more black communities on the map using ArcGIS technologies and co-creation methodologies between community members, technologists, students, and filmmakers.