Louis J. Massiah joins the Lab and the Co-Creation Studio in partnership with the MIT MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program. He is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have 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 author 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 How to Make A Flower: La Méthode MOBO (2020) have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe, and Africa. In 2011, he 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. He 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.
While at the Lab, he is working on A Community Archive for the Seventh Generation, an exploration of how community knowledge, including narratives, preserved in time-based media, can be archived in a way that is accessible, usable, durable, and readable to generations in the future.