IN CONVERSATION: ROBESON TAJ FRAZIER AND JHEANELLE BROWN

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with a special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. Jheanelle is a board member and a programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. She is currently on faculty at the California Institute of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design.

Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer, University of Southern California associate professor, arts and humanities curator, and Emmy and Los Angeles Press Club-nominated producer of docuseries and documentary film.  He is the host/producer of two PBS productions (the award-winning Hip Hop and the Metaverse and Outside the Lyrics), and the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (2014), and the award-winning New Yorker magazine favorite, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (2023). He is also the executive director of USC’s Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA), a media, arts, and culture-driven center that facilitates interdisciplinary education, research, programming, and cultural productions.