2021 Pace-setter Honoree: Portia Cobb

Portia Cobb joined the Film and Video faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1992 as an Assistant Professor and Artistic Director (1992-2009) of the school’s Community Media Project.

Currently she teaches both introductory upper level production and cross-disciplinary topical elective offerings in the department ranging from Radical Cinemas; Radical Black Film; Experimental Ethnography and a capstone course in film (Multicultural America).

She studied Film at San Francisco State University where the foundations of her continued explorations as an interdisciplinary artist creating in film, Digital Video, photography and Installation-were formed.

Focused on The Documentary, her experimental narratives explore the inner landscapes of identity, memory, history and place. Through her documentation of urban and rural communities in the Americas and West Africa she draws upon these themes as a means to confront forced forgetting and resettlement.

As a Call & Response Artist in Residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Brown Deer she has developed plein air performances and temporal works that include “Lizzie’s Legacy & Lizzie’s Garden” in which she has embodied the figure of her great aunt, Elizabeth Smashum, to share the history and memory of her family’s Gullah Geechee identity.

She is currently a principal researcher, leading the creative team for the UWM Gun Violence Project with Department of Communication professors Leslie Harris, Erin M. Parcell with Debra Gilispie (founder of Mothers against Gun Violence).

portiacobb.com

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