The Black Film Center & Archive Welcomes a New Director

By Jay Upshaw

Published October 12, 2023 at 8:55 PM EDT

Dr. Novotny Lawrence at the Black Film Center & Archive

The Black Film Center & Archive has been preserving the work of Black filmmakers all over the world since 1981. With their vast collection of over 3000 film and television titles, the center also acts as a research facility for people wanting to learn more about Black Film and its aesthetics.

And it has a new director. Dr. Novotny Lawrence is a scholar of Black cinematic experiences and pop culture. He is the author of Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Popular Culture. His goal at the archive is to raise its profile and make it a more public-facing space.

Alex Chambers

Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.

See stories by Alex Chambers