Department: Entertainment and Media Studies

Booker T Mattison‘s film “Ungubani (Who Are You?)” won ‘Best of Competition‘ in the Narrative Category of the BEA Festival of Media Arts. Garland McLaurin was the cinematographer on the film.  The film will screen during the awards ceremony at the BEA Convention in Las Vegas in April, 2020.

Abstract: The 1950s and 1960s saw a swell of films shot on location and abroad, often big-budget, widescreen epic films. These runaway productions represented a practical financial decision for Hollywood studios, incentivized by tax breaks, government subsidies, frozen funds and rising union salaries in the U.S. When George Stevens began pre-production on his Biblical epic, […]

Abstract:  In the 1970s, almost fifty years before the “Time’s Up” movement, women in Hollywood unions organized “women’s committees” to counter institutional sexism and address rampant underemployment. While the unions supported the general motive behind these committees’ efforts, women activists struggled to gather information about hiring practices and enact policy changes. To understand gender inequity […]

Garland McLaurin (Lecturer EMST) has been awarded his third Princess Grace Foundation Grant ($1,000) for a mid-career development class of his choosing. The Princess Grace Foundation continues the legacy of Princess Grace (Kelly) by elevating extraordinary emerging artists in theater, dance, and film via awards in the form of grants, scholarships, and fellowships. Aided by this […]

Booker T. Mattison was invited by the Writers Guild East in New York to participate in showrunner trainer for non-fiction shows in New York on November 16th and 17th.

Jay Hamilton organized and led a panel titled “Mass Communication and Transnational Resistance: Independent Media Centers 20 Years On” at the Union for Democratic Communications international conference in Oakland. The panelists addressed the chequered legacy of IMCs, their growth and decline, their form and practice of online/online-assisted social activism since their emergence in Seattle 1999 during the […]

Booker T. Mattison, His film Bosniak screened at the Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival Thursday Oct 10th at 3:15p and at the Hampton University Film Festival, Hampton, VA Nov. 12th.  https://morehousefilmfest2019.eventive.org/schedule/bosniak-5d642379a4500d0029a0429c.

Abstract: The early 1970s marked a number of significant changes in the television landscape: new regulatory structures, the growth of cable, and shifts in programming including a steep rise in televised reruns. By 1972, reruns constituted over half of prime time network television. Although this practice benefited the financial bottom-line for producers, it was frustrating […]

Booker T. Mattison has been awarded a Special Funding Grant ($750) from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts to support visual effects and film festival submission costs associated with his short film, Ungubani (Who Are You?). The 15-minute narrative short film tells the story of a young black man who puts himself at risk […]

Abstract: Kim Kardashian has received much attention for her media empire, including her game, published by Glu Mobile. The game’s premise plays a role in what I characterize as “Feminine Play Style,” an emerging mode of video games that functions through assumptions about an idealized vision of the woman player and her relationship with leisure […]