"Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" -- documentary screening with filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain

WGS is proud to co-sponsor a screening of Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, the first-ever feature documentary about Lorraine Hansberry, the visionary playwright who authored the groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun. An overnight sensation, the play transformed the American theater and has long been considered a classic, yet the remarkable story of the playwright faded from view. With this documentary, filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain resurrects the Lorraine Hansberry we have forgotten—a passionate artist, committed activist and sought-after public intellectual who waged an outspoken and defiant battle against injustice in 20th-century America. The film reveals Hansberry’s prescient works tackling race, human rights, women’s equality and sexuality that anticipated social and political movements on the horizon. 

The screening will be followed by a discussion and reception with the filmmaker Hather Tracey Strain, moderated by Robert Reid-Pharr. This event is free and open to the public.

Tracy Heather Strain is an award-winning documentary filmmaker committed to using film, video and interactive technology to reveal the ways that race, ethnicity, gender and class work to shape lives. Since 1986 Strain has worked on numerous documentaries for PBS as well as videos for museums, schools and nonprofits. She is president and CEO of Boston-based media company The Film Posse, which she runs with her husband Randall MacLowry.

Strain produced the festival favorite documentary Adrift: Lost on the Road of Expectations (2002) and wrote and directed the notable episode “Building the Alaska Highway” (2005) for the long-running PBS series American Experience. She also wrote and directed “The Story We Tell,” an installment of Race: The Power of an Illusion a three-part documentary that aired on PBS in 2003.

Strain’s most recently broadcast documentaries for American Experience are “The Mine Wars” and “The Battle of Chosin,” serving as coordinating producer on both. The first tells the story of West Virginia coal miners’ uprisings in the early 20th century; the other revisits a pivotal 1950 Korean War battle, the first major military clash of the Cold War.

Previously, Strain directed and produced episodes of two award-winning documentary miniseries: Unnatural Causes (2008), winner of the duPont-Columbia Award, and I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts (1999), a Peabody Award winner. She was also associate producer of one episode of the 1993 series The Great Depression, a nominee for the Television Critics Association (TCA) Award for Best Program of the Year. Each of these projects aired on PBS.

Strain worked as an art department coordinator on Mira Nair’s 1991 feature Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington. She began her career as a production secretary at The Chedd-Angier Production Company in Watertown, Massachusetts, which produced science, nature and technology-focused public television episodes.

A graduate of Wellesley College, Strain received her master of education degree (technology, innovation and education) from Harvard. She is now a professor of the practice at Northeastern University in Boston, where she teaches documentary production part-time. 

Sponsored by the Hutchins Center, co-sponsored by Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Department of African and African American Studies.