June Cross, a native New Yorker, likes to tell uncomfortable stories that lie at the intersection of poverty, race and politics in the United States. She is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she founded a program in journalistic documentary. Her latest film explores the dilemmas facing people living with HIV in the rural South. “Wilhemina’s War,” aired on PBS’ Independent Lens in February 2016. Her last film, “The Old Man and the Storm” followed a family trying to rebuild in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
She is perhaps best known for an Emmy-winning documentary about how race and kin played out in her own family, “Secret Daughter: the Story of a Mixed Race Child and the Mother who Gave Her Away,” which aired on Frontline in 1996. A book by the same title was published ten years ago. She was an Executive Producer of the six-hour PBS series, “This Far by Faith, back in 2003. She has worked for CBS News and for PBS’ NewsHour. She lives in New York, with the jazz drummer Mike Clark.
While at OpenDocLab, June is working on her project ‘Casting the Vote’, a participatory community dinner based on recent scholarship and activism around voter suppression in the United States.