Black Feminist Video Essay: A Screening and Lecture with Dr. Nzingha Kendall

The Cultural Research and Practice Lab invites you to join a talk and screening by Dr. Nzingha Kendall on the Black feminist video essay

Date : Wednesday, November 13th, 2024
Time : 5 PM
Location : Alumni Reading Room

About the talk:
The term “video essay” has a myriad of associations: once synonymous with the documentary film genre also known as the “essay film,” the phrase increasingly refers more broadly to the creative and critical reappropriation of archival images performed by video artists, YouTubers, journalists, and scholars. Among film and visual studies scholars, the video essay–also named “the audiovisual essay”– has gained legitimacy as a form of scholarly criticism, though it remains marginal in traditional scholarly venues. Dr. Nzingha Kendall will speak about the video essay as a form for Black feminist analysis and poetics, exploring the significance of the form for affective and reparative engagements with diasporic Black film archives, performance archives, and material histories. The event will include a screening of influential video essays of the past years, including several of her own works of videographic criticism.

About Nzingha Kendall:
Nzingha Kendall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University. A scholar and programmer, Kendall’s work focuses on researching, screening, and generating conversations about moving images by Black women from across the diaspora.  Her research focuses on experimental filmmaking practices, looking at Black women filmmakers from the late 20th century to the present. She has been a fellow and affiliate faculty at the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, a programmer for Indiana University’s Black Film Center/Archive, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her video essays have been published in numerous online scholarly and public humanities venues, including  [In]Transition: A Media Commons Project. 

About the Cultural Research and Practice Lab:
Cultural Research & Practice Lab is an interdisciplinary series at Pratt Institute helmed by Dalia Davoudi and Shayla Lawz in the department of Humanities and Media Studies. Its central mission is to host cross-disciplinary conversations between artists and thinkers who work at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice to explore the relationship between aesthetic forms and social formations. To learn more, please visit CRP Lab’s PAGE

Please RSVP if you are interested in attending.