Pearl Bowser (1931-2023) was an award-winning author, television director, film director, producer, and film archivist. She was the author of a book on the first 10 years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She's thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She was the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey included teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s. Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers. Bowser stumbled upon her career in film when a friend, documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock, asked her to work in his office where she helped out with billing and ordering equipment. She was the director of the Theater Project at Third World Newsreel, the largest distributor of independent film by people of color in the United States, from 1978 to 1987.
Pearl Bowser
Studios
Banks
Pearl Bowser worked in the Banks studio.
Banks, an ell on the north end of the Lodge dormitory, was first used as an artist’s studio in 1970. Since then, it has played host to an extraordinary list of writers working in several disciplines. In all seasons, Fellows have enjoyed the pastoral view through the French doors facing a field…