Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, was invited to present at the MIT Open Documentary Lab on April 20. 

She and Louis Massiah of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia presented a collaborative conversation on the archival, historiographic, political, and curatorial process and decision making in mounting the We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media national touring exhibition. They are the co-programmers of We Tell.  Dr. William Uricchio, Director and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, moderated.  

Zimmermann and Massiah also did an extended seminar with MIT Open Doc fellows on participatory community media, historiography, and archival challenges. 

We Tell is currently running for six weeks at MIT via virtual cinema. All six programs in the exhibition will be screened, with one program each week.  

We Tell is a national traveling exhibition of short documentaries produced by community media entities from 1967 to the present. It is programmed in six themes emerging in community media:  Body Publics, Collaborative Knowledges, Environments of Race and Place, States of Violence, Turf, and Wages of Work. 

The exhibition features 41 media works from 36 diverse community-based producers, and works from 19 states and Puerto Rico.  

We Tell is supported through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation Just Films, and the Independence Public Media Foundation.