Filmmaker Portia Cobb to deliver Freeman Lecture Oct. 26

Portia Cobb, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Department of Film and director of its Community Media Project, will deliver the 2006 Adrenee Glover Freeman Lecture in African American Women's Studies at 7 p.m. Oct. 26. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The title of Cobb's lecture is, "Stirring the Pot: Youth, Media, Activism, and Community." A video artist and filmmaker, Cobb will discuss her research involving documentaries, including those about the Hurricane Katrina Disaster. She also will discuss the complex family, community, and state relations engendered over the years regarding her family's land. Her great-grandmother purchased the land, which is located in the marshlands outside of Charleston, in 1894.

Cobb has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee since 1992 and was named director of the Community Media Project the following year. The decade-old project emphasizes the presentation of films created by and focusing on people of African descent. Among its goals are to provide an outlet for filmmakers who do not have the resources to make or distribute their own films, and to work with city youth via community-based organizations to teach them how to turn their creative energies into films. Among the youth projects are the well-received documentaries Sign of the Times (1993) and Enough is Enough: Timeout for the Sellout (1994). Cobb's own work deals with the issues that face the black community, including her award-winning, No Justice, No Peace (1992), an experimental documentary focusing on police brutality.

Cobb is a 1994 recipient of the Diverse Visions Regional Interdisciplinary Grant of Intermedia Arts Minnesota, and a recipient of the Carnegie Mellon University Studies for Creative Inquiry Artist's Residency Fellowship.

The Freeman Lecture was established in 1993 in memory of Adrenee Glover Freeman, a Columbia attorney who was active in civic affairs and served on the Community Advisory Board of the Women's Studies Program. The Freeman Lecture is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, and the African American Studies Program.

10/06