Susan Robeson
Keynote Address
Susan Robeson, an American author and producer, has been a filmmaker and broadcast journalist for most of her career. Her works, including the feature documentary Don’t Believe the Hype, have appeared on PBS, Channel 4/UK, NBC and ABC affiliates, and at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and Lincoln Center Film Society.
As executive producer of PBS in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Robeson transformed the station’s second channel into a model for community empowerment and development, working with BIPOC communities, as well as street gangs around the nation documenting their efforts to organize peace treaties. Robeson also trained township activists in post-apartheid South Africa in broadcast-quality production, and she designed a nationwide citizen journalism initiative for the President of Timor-Leste—the Nobel Peace laureate Dr. Ramos-Horta—to help build democracy in this first new nation of the 21st century. Early in her career, she co-founded Third World Newsreel, an independent film production and distribution collective and co-produced LIKE IT IS with GIL NOBLE, the longest-running Black produced program on television.
Robeson has been a visiting professor in film, communications and Africana Studies at Macalester College, Carleton College, William Paterson University and Rutgers University, where she is a part-time lecturer.
Robeson is executive producer of Paul Robeson: Voice of Freedom—The Complete Columbia, RCA HMV and Victor Recordings, a SONY 14-CD box set with remastered tracks and a richly illustrated 160-page book for which she contributed an essay. She is the author of The Whole Word In His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson; Grandpa Stops A War; and author/editor of the forthcoming, Paul Robeson and Eslanda G. Robeson: Unpublished and Selected Correspondence, Diaries and Writings, 1922–1973.