Louis J. Massiah is an American documentary
filmmaker,
MacArthur Prize winner, and community activist who has worked with Philadelphians to develop filmmaking skills and to access media resources in order to record their own stories.[1]
He is the founder and executive director of the Scribe Video Center, a media arts center providing educational workshops for community groups and emerging independent media makers.[3] Since 2005 he has served as executive producer of Precious Places, a Philadelphia video history project that tells histories of the city's communities as a collection short films conceived and produced by community members.[1][4][5] With funding from the
Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, he also directed a community film history project in 2014 called Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, which explored the history of Philadelphia's diverse Muslim communities (including
Sufis, Sunnis, the
Nation of Islam, the
Ahmadis, the
Moorish Science Temple of America, and others) through a series of short films.[6][7]
Discussing the goals and achievement of the Scribe Video Center in a program for the
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) in 2020, Massiah described it as an effort of "participatory community video", which responded to issues such as
gentrification and low-income housing shortages while aiming to develop new understandings of place and history, new visions of what the community can be, and new plans for civic engagement. He noted that he had worked with
UNICEF to establish similar programs in
Haiti and
Jamaica.[8]
^"Louis Massiah", HAIKU (The Humanities and the Arts in the Integrated Knowledge University).
^City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy (April 2018).
"Louis Messiah"(PDF). Retrieved November 12, 2020.{{
cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)