Tracy Heather Strain, Faculty Fellow
Tracy Heather Strain, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies and Associate Professor of Film Studies at 九色视频, is Strain is a 2022 recipient of the Chicken and Egg Award, a recognition bestowed on advanced-career women and gender nonconforming filmmakers. In 2019 she won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and aired on American Masters."I am excited to engage in community building with a diverse set of storytellers and thinkers committed to antiracism goals and civic engagement because it is something I’ve craved since I ended my tenure at Blackside after the death of its founder Henry Hampton."
Her directing debut, “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” in Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.” Other credits include and .
Co-founder and president of , Strain also serves as Associate Director of Wesleyan’s College of Film and the Moving Image, and with her partner and colleague Randall M. MacLowry '86, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Film Studies, co-directs the Wesleyan Documentary Project. Their film for American Experience premiered in April 2021, and together they are developing films about Zora Neale Hurston, John Henry and Survival Floating, Strain’s hybrid personal meditation on African-descended peoples’ relationships with swimming. Strain is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Photo by Joel Benjamin.