Prof. Carroll Parrott Blue, a pioneer of participatory filmmaking and digital storytelling, will be visiting campus as part of the Massachusetts International Film Festival on April 16, when she will screen her multimedia project, “Black Houston: Digital Storytelling” (7:30pm, 137 Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst). A scholar specializing in documentary film and African American cinema, Prof. Blue’s research and multimedia digital projects are exemplars of “emerging methodologies” (for more information, see her biographical sketch below).

About Carroll Parrott Blue
During 2006–2008 Carroll Parrott Blue is working as a University of Houston Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar. Blue’s digital media specialties include Locative Media, Website Community Narratives, and Community-Made New Media Applications. She is a Documentary Filmmaker and teaches African American Cinema. Blue is a San Diego State University professor emeritus. Blue is an award-winning filmmaker, multimedia producer, author and public artist who blends text, stills, graphics and moving image in traditional and new media formats. Her experimental memoir, The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, is a combination book, DVD-ROM, and website. In 2004, Dawn was selected by the American Library Association as one of the thirty best American Association of University Press publications and Dawn’s DVD-ROM won the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Jury Award in its first-ever New Forms category.

In her most recent project, Professor Blue and her research team collected oral narratives about an historically black neighborhood in
Houston, filming community members’ stories on location and placing them on an interactive map. A website showcasing her “storymapping” project:
http://www.storycenter.org/thirdward.html