Tracy Heather Strain Pro

Tracy Heather Strain, a two-time Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker, explores stories about the ways diverse peoples have experienced life in the United States. A 2022 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Award, Strain won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and subsequently aired on American Masters. Her directing debut, “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” in Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, “Building the Alaska Highway,” as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.” Other credits include “The Stories We Tell” in California Newsreel’s Race: The Power of an Illusion and “When the Bough Breaks” for their duPont Award-winning Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?. Strain, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies and co-director of WesDocs at Wesleyan University, also serves as president of The Film Posse, which she co-founded with her partner, filmmaker Randall MacLowry. Their latest co-production is “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space” for American Experience, which Strain directed and wrote. John Henry: Unmasking America’s Real First, Survival Floating, My Hood Is the Burbs and short series A Baker’s Dozen: 13 Essential Donut Stories are among the projects in their development pipeline.