Michele Prettyman

Since childhood, Michele Prettyman voraciously consumed stories about black life, history, and culture and which her parents shared with their children. It was no surprise then, that as an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, she paired her interests in black culture and with her growing curiosity in the spheres of documentary and feature film, leading to B.A. degrees in Afro-American Studies and Radio/TV and Film. Riveted by the power of storytelling, but compelled to challenge what writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would later describe as ‘the danger of the single story’ about black life and culture, she embarked on a career that would pursue her own creative voice, help students unlock the power of race and mediated culture, and imagine innovative approaches to the study of race, culture and consciousness.

After completing her undergraduate degrees, Michele delved into production working as a Production Coordinator/Manager for National Geographic TV and as a freelancer for an independent production in Barbados. Years later as a graduate student and mother, she would study film and digital production at Georgia State University, completing a Master’s degree in Film, Video and Digital Imaging. In this hybrid program, she was trained in production and film theory and she completed a screenplay thesis entitled “Muddied Waters.” Compelled to pursue a PhD, Michele continued on at Georgia State immersing herself in moving image and critical race/visual culture studies. Her time at Georgia State was fruitful as she would teach and design a number of courses and begin cultivating her voice as a scholar and public intellectual. In 2012 she completed her Ph.D. in Communication with an emphasis on Moving Image Studies.

While race, film and visual culture studies are central to Michele’s research, pedagogy and scholarship, the core of Michele’s life work is her interest in spirituality and the ways in which spiritual and cultural practices facilitate healing from personal and racial trauma, build community, and enable creativity and well-being. Michele has studied a number of spiritual principles and traditions which have shaped her own growth and her influenced her research, which she describes as “a quest to understand how we might explore how consciousness is mediated through race, film and visual culture."

Michele 's recent writing and research includes a number of diverse projects. She co-edited a ‘Close Up’ series in Black Camera journal on the ‘New York Scene’ of black independent filmmakers and contributed to The Lemonade Reader, a dynamic anthology on the impact of Beyoncé's magnum opus. Additionally, she published an essay on hip hop and music video culture as part of an ‘In Focus’ series in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Her work has been presented at diverse forums including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Transforming Public History Conference, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), the World Picture Conference, the National Communication Association, the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, and the National Council of Black Studies. She has published work in a range of journals and online platforms including: Black Camera (An international film journal), the literary journal Callaloo, liquid blackness: a research project on blackness and aesthetics and In Media Res: A Media Commons Project. She is also a contributor and a member of the editorial board for the liquid blackness journal of aesthetics and black studies.

In 2017, she was a co-recipient of a grant which funded a historical documentary storytelling project entitled: “In Search of a Shared History: Making Black Lives Visible at Jarrell Plantation.” This project will ultimately be part of a larger Africana studies digital research project entitled, "Digitizing Black Life and Culture in Middle Georgia."

A co-founder of Daughters of Eve Media (DOE), a media consulting company Michele created with her sister Terri Bowles, has partnered with the internationally renowned American Black Film Festival (ABFF) and helped develop its Kathy Collins Women in Film Initiative. In 2013, she coordinated events around the Atlanta tour of LA Rebellion filmmakers in partnership with UCLA’s film archive, Emory University and Georgia State University. Additionally, she was a co-curator of the College Town Film Festival; a partnership between Mercer, Wesleyan College and Middle Georgia State University and she served as the Artistic Director for the inaugural Tubman African American Film Festival in 2019.

In 2020 after over twenty years in the South, Michele accepted a position at Fordham University at Lincoln Center in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African and African American Studies.

As a teacher, scholar, media consultant, and writer developing her own content, Michele works to expand our understanding of the meditated universe and to provide support for her students, storytellers, and the broader community.