TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing
Join us for a special screening and discussion of TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, the latest documentary from acclaimed documentary filmmaker and A.D. White Professor-at-Large Louis Massiah, Cornell Class of 1977!
TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025) is a biography of the influential writer, filmmaker and cultural worker, who with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. The film is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara's life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students.
Filmmaker Louis Massiah will join for a conversation after the film with Mendi + Keith Obadike.
Free admission and free popcorn! Presented by the A.D. White Professors-at-Large Program at Cornell and cosponsored by the Department of Performing & Media Arts.
About the filmmaker
Louis Massiah '77 is an esteemed interdisciplinary documentary filmmaker and film producer practiced in articulating the values of community media, challenging the common beliefs about how film should be made, and organizing community documentary strategies across media practices to address important but often-neglected subjects with integrity, insight, and artistry.
Massiah is the founding director (1982) and current Executive Director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a hub for artistic expression, dedicated to empowering underrepresented and emerging filmmakers in forging creative and inquiring methods, using video as a medium, to record issues affecting diverse economic and cultural communities, as a call to collective action and catalyst for social change.
He has developed production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 150 documentaries; Muslim Voices of Philadelphia; The Great Migration - A City Transformed, and The Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets. Massiah’s documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, Cecil B. Moore, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown and TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing.
Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists and composers whose media works and musical monuments explore the intersections of identity, sound, and technology. From their early Internet-based projects, treating the web as a public space for artistic and social experimentation, to architecturally scaled public sound installations, they transform urban and digital environments into resonant sites of collective listening. Professors at Cornell University, they exhibit internationally.
Part of our "Campus Collaborations" series. Visit: www.tcbdoc.com for more.
"On the thirtieth anniversary of her death, Louis Massiah has conjured the great Toni Cade Bambara back to life. Through archival footage and personal testimonies—most notably and eloquently by her friend, editor, and champion, Toni Morrison—this formidable writer and warrior for social justice blazes back into consciousness.
There was simply nobody else like her. TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing offers a tonic for today’s woes and a lesson in joyousness for today’s challenges. With its propulsive jazz soundtrack and knowledge of history, Massiah’s film feeds a bone-deep hunger for inspiration." — B. Ruby Rich, scholar, consultant, and member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences