Esteemed interdisciplinary documentary filmmaker and film producer Louis Massiah ‘77 has been appointed as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University for a six-year term (2024-30) in the field of Arts. Mendi Obadike (Professor, Dept. of Performing & Media Arts) and Keith Obadike (Professor, Dept. of Art) will serve as faculty host and co-host, respectively.

Massiah is the founding director (1982), and current Executive Director, of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a hub for artistic expression, dedicated to empowering underrepresented and emerging filmmakers in forging creative and inquiring methods, using video as a medium, to record issues affecting diverse economic and cultural communities, as a call to collective action and catalyst for social change.

At Scribe, Massiah served as executive producer for “Precious Places” (2005), a citywide, community, video history project in the form of twenty-one short documentaries, conceived to encapsulate, celebrate, and preserve the unique cultural histories and identities within the Philadelphia region’s various neighborhood groups, documenting the buildings, public spaces, parks, and landmarks holding memories for those residents.

Massiah’s work as a filmmaker has garnered numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (1996), two Rockefeller-Tribeca fellowships (1990; 1996), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1994) and a Peabody Award (1990). In addition to receiving numerous Emmy nominations, Massiah is also a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the field of Documentary. He has been hosted as a frequent artist-in-residence at several academic institutions, including MIT, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, and was recently involved in the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in Ithaca, NY.

Massiah’s commissions include the President’s House sit, a five-channel permanent video installation for the U.S. National Park Service. In 2019, Massiah was chosen to represent the United States for the inauguration of the Le Muse des Civilizations Noir (Museum of Black Civilizations) in Dakar (Senegal), exhibiting 44 short films and representing the histories and contemporary cultures of Black people globally.

Massiah received his B.A. from Cornell in 1977 and received his M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT in 1982.

The Professors-at-Large Program at sponsors outstanding scholars and public intellectuals in the life sciences, physical sciences, humanities, social sciences and the arts. Previous professors-at-large include writer and actor John Cleese, primatologist Jane Goodall, jazz great Wynton Marsalis and novelist Toni Morrison, M.A. ’55.

Twice during their terms, professors-at-large visit campus for about a week while classes are in session to interact with the Cornell community under a single mandate: to enliven the intellectual and cultural life of the university.

Photo credit: Conrad Louis-Charles for Scribe Video Center