Kendall Moore (ODL Fellow 2020-2021), PhD, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a Professor in the departments of Journalism and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining the faculty at URI in 2003, she worked as a television journalist focusing on medical, health, race, and environmental issues. Moore has produced numerous independent documentaries that have aired on PBS and in various film festivals including Charm City (1996), Song in the Crisis (2004), Sovereign Nation/Sovereign Neighbor (2006), The Good Radical (2009), Sick Building (2014) and Jalen and Joanna: A Lead Paint Story (2017). She is also the director of the “Can We Talk? Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented People of Color” series. Moore has also written and directed fiction films, including Philosophy of the Encounter (PoE) (67min), about a college student’s journey to understand her racial identity. PoE premiered at the Arusha International Film Festival (Best Feature) in the Caribbean, and the Black International Film Festival in Nashville in October 2016.
She has received several grants and awards for her work, including two Fulbright Scholar Awards: Tanzania (2001) and Jamaica (Specialist, 2004); The Rhode Island Film Fellowship for Outstanding Filmmaking (2007); and, the recipient of two Metcalf Awards for excellence in journalism in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, she received an NAACP award for excellence in documentary filmmaking for Jalen and Joanna: A Lead Paint Story. And in 2016, she was commended by Crain’s magazine as a professor of merit in the field of journalism. She serves on the boards of The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting as well as The Story Board at Salve Regina University. She has been active in mentoring women of color interested in documentary film production. She earned her B.A. from Syracuse University in Latin American Studies and an M.A. in Media Studies and documentary film, from The New School for Social Research. Her PhD, which she completed at the European Graduate School for Media and Communication, focuses on black aesthetics, metaphysical philosophy.
While at OpenDocLab, Kendall is working on The Decolonizing Science Documentary Film Project.