Keynote: The Importance of Place

Event Overview

In this Keynote, Louis Massiah will explore community media as a vital cultural practice rooted in collaboration, sharing excerpts from his films to illustrate this approach.

As founding director of Scribe Video Center, Massiah has developed models for participatory media production that support individuals and communities in telling their own stories. Challenging conventional notions of authorship, he emphasizes the shared processes of research, production, and exhibition, framing media-making as a collective endeavor.

Central to his presentation is Massiah’s ongoing commitment to building institutional frameworks that sustain community-based storytelling over time. Through Scribe, he has cultivated a space where emerging and experienced makers alike can engage with film and video as tools for inquiry, dialogue, and connection.

Massiah will reflect on how these structures enable the circulation of knowledge across generations and foster networks of cultural production grounded in local experience. Within that framework, he will discuss Precious Places, a longstanding project that brings community residents together to create short documentaries about sites of personal and shared significance.

Through Massiah’s lens, filmmaking emerges not only as an art form but also as a participatory process capable of showcasing more inclusive narratives and shaping a more just society.

What You'll Learn

How media production can function as a tool for collective memory, civic participation, and social change
How collaborative storytelling can challenge traditional authorship and amplify community voices
Strategies for building sustainable frameworks to support community-based storytelling over time
How media-making projects illuminate overlooked local histories and link them to contemporary conversations about justice and equity

Speaker

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Louis Massiah ’77

Founder and Executive Director, Scribe Video Center

A.D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University

Louis Massiah ’77 is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts organization offering production workshops for emerging independent filmmakers and community groups. As an educator and institution builder, Massiah has developed collaborative media production methodologies that help first-time makers author their own stories. His major community history initiatives include the Precious Places Community History Project (139 documentaries), Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, The Great Migration: A City Transformed, the Power Politics oral history series, and “Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets,” a history of a Black neighborhood in the 20th century.

Massiah’s directing credits include “The Bombing of Osage Avenue,” “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices,” and “TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing,” screening at Cornell Cinema on April 10, 2026. His commissions include “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a Nation” for the U.S. National Park Service and installations representing the United States at the Musée des Civilisations Noires.

Massiah earned a B.A. from Cornell (1977) and an M.S. from MIT (1982). He was elected an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell in 2024.

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