DIRECTORS

Tracy Heather Strain, a two-time Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker, explores stories about the ways diverse peoples have experienced life in the U.S. Her latest directing project was Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space (2023) for American Experience. A 2022 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Award, Strain won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and subsequently aired on American Masters. Her directing debut, “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” in Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, “Building the Alaska Highway,” as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.” Other credits include Race: The Power of an Illusion and duPont Award-winning Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?. Strain, who also teaches documentary filmmaking at Wesleyan University, is president of The Film Posse, which she co-founded with Randall MacLowry. The pair is presently developing several independent projects including Survival Floating, a hybrid personal meditation on African-descended peoples’ relationships with swimming and water, and John Henry: Unmasking America's Real First Black Superhero.