Portia Cobb, b.1954 Bronx, NY

I make short, single-channel, non-linear documentary films, photographic essays, and mixed-media installations. while a graduate student in San Francisco State’s experimental film program, I began working in 16 mm film. My thesis, No Justice No Peace! Young Black ImMEDIAte (1991), was made on hi-8 video because it was new, inexpensive, and easy to use. I now work in HD video, audio, and photography.

My work is hybrid—part personal diary, part field notebook, part documentary essay—and has taken me to Brazil, Central America, and West Africa. Early influences include filmmakers Sarah Maldoror and Camille Billops, artist Betye Saar, and performance artists Lorraine Grady and Adrian Piper.

My practice focuses on my creolized Gullah Geechee maternal heritage from South Carolina: history, memory, and forced forgetting, using elders’ oral histories and archives. Recent projects expand these themes in Northeast Brazil (Salvador and Cachoeira, Bahia) through collaborations with artists and scholars.