About the Speakers

Dana Robinson has exhibited at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas State University, Fuller Rosen Gallery, 92nd Street Y, Spellerberg Projects, A.I.R. Gallery, Haul Gallery, and Regular Normal. Her work extends beyond gallery walls, as she's lent her talent to publications like the New York Times Magazine and The Baffler, and public art work for ArtBridge in Bushwick, New York. Her work has also been written about in Artsy, It’s Nice That, and Ain't Bad magazine to name a few. She was a fellow at A.I.R Gallery, a Vision Fund resident at ISCP and has shown work at Turley Gallery in Hudson, New York and The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, in New York City and Kates-Ferri Projects in New York City. Later this summer she will also be participating in a group show Infinite Scroll with Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas.

Mia Mask is the Mary Riepma Ross Professor of Film at Vassar College. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. At Vassar she teaches African American cinema, documentary history, seminars on the horror genre and auteurs like Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Charles Burnett, and William Greaves. She also teaches feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and genre courses.

She is the author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western and Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, both published by University of Illinois Press. Divas on Screen was featured on the NPR program "Tell Me More." Mask edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema, published by Routledge. And, she published the jointly edited collection, Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age (Bloomsbury).

Mask has written film reviews and covered festivals for IndieWire.com, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Time Out New York, The Poughkeepsie Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her criticism was anthologized in Best American Movie Writing. She has been a visiting professor at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly essays have appeared in journals such as Black Camera, and The Black Scholar. They have also been anthologized in African American National Biography; Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s; Film and Literature; and American Cinema of the 1970's.

Her cultural commentary has been featured on National Public Radio programs “Tell Me More,” “Marketplace” and “Morning Edition,” on Soledad O'Brien’s “Matter of Fact,” and in documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, the Criterion Channel, and CNN’s The Movies.