Global Institute for Black Girls in Film & Media Launches at ArtCenter

ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena has established The Global Institute for Black Girls in Film & Media, a research collective designed to help scholars, artists, filmmakers and visual storytellers shine a light on how Black girls are represented in film, television and across other mediums.

The Institute is designed by Black women to center Black women and girls and honor the nuance of their varying experiences on and off the screen.

“My favorite film growing up was Crooklyn (1994) directed by Spike Lee,” said advisory board member Gray Bayne. “This film was a revelation for a little Black girl in cornrows who rarely saw herself on screen. That’s why I’m so excited for this inaugural Think Tank. We’ll be talking to Black girls and women about the stories and images that inspire them.”

“To nurture this kind of scholarly work at an institution like ArtCenter is an important part of equipping our students with the skills to tell authentic Black stories in media,” said Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Dr. Aaron Bruce. “We believe The Institute will have a ripple effect across our campus community, through the entertainment industry and hope that this group can inspire more scholarship of this kind at other art and design schools globally.”

The Institute will focus on three key pillars.

Professional development and executive education, research and decoding and youth empowerment and community engagement

The Institute is committed to interdisciplinary educational excellence in media; promoting an understanding of the representations of Black women in coursework; incorporating public engagement as essential to the campus-community collaborative; engaging productively with local, regional, national and international organizations to advance respect for centering Black girls across media, audiences and industry professionalization.

The institute will interrogate the systems at play when framing Black girlhood and will reinforce the importance of accurate representation by understanding the power of myths and storytelling, according to a statement.

“By calling into question existing notions of Black girlhood, The Institute will trace their origins and trajectories. New possibilities will be imagined for how to engage with narratives of Black girlhood in cinema, advertising and media,” the statement reads.

The origins of The Institute date back to 2021, when ArtCenter invited Dr. Lisa Covington to conduct a scholarly presentation on her research on Black girls in film. Moved by the dearth of scholarship on Black girls in film as presented by Covington, The Center for Diversity Equity and Inclusion took the initiative to call upon the expertise of Covington, filmmaker and alumna Elizabeth Gray Bayne and Scholar in Residence Ricky Weaver to form the Founding Advisory Board for The Institute.

A series of free public discussions presented by the institute is currently underway — the first one took place last month.