Biography
Glen Trotiner Professor of Visual Storytelling, University at Albany, SUNY, and director of the Graduate Program in Public History. Author, Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies (Cambridge University Press, 2024); research and writing supported in part by a 2021 Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other books include Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen: (Focal Press 2022), now in its 5th edition with a 6th contracted for 2027, and various editions available in Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Polish, and Arabic. Also (with Kenn Rabin), Archival Storytelling: Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music, now in its second edition (Focal Press, 2020).
Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker with credits on more than 50 hours of material, primarily broadcast in prime time on PBS, but also including IMAX films — most recently, Einstein’s Incredible Universe (co-writer). Other credits include the feature documentary Slavery by Another Name (writer) as well as the series I’ll Make Me A World (series writer, episode writer), This Far by Faith (development writer), and Eyes on the Prize (producer/director/writer, two episodes).
She has taught master classes and/or served on film festival juries in the United States and in Poland, Belgium, Italy, England, and Lebanon.
Please visit www.sheilacurranbernard.com.
Films
Slavery by Another Name, writer (2012)
Role: Other
Funded in part by the NEH and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon, this 90-minute feature documentary looks at convict leasing, peonage, and other forms of forced, unpaid labor, primarily affecting African Americans in the U.S. South, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II. Directed by Sam Pollard, the film is one of four showcased in an ongoing national public engagement campaign of the NEH. Full film streaming at link above; a 20-minute classroom version is also available.
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