facing whiteness
DIRECTOR: WHITNEY DOW
Innovation Outreach Award: Facing Whiteness (Formally: Whiteness Project) is an ongoing interactive story-based investigation into how Americans who identify as “white” or “partially white” experience their ethnicity designed to catalyze conversations about race in America and break down prejudices, structural racism, and deconstruct white supremacy. Launched in 2014 in partnership with PBS’s POV, and now working in collaboration with Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, the project is in the process of interviewing 1,000 Americans who identify as white or partially white and collecting data on 5,000 individuals in 20 cities across the country. The outputs will be a multi-platform public media project, deep community engagement, and a research study which will deepen academic knowledge about how whiteness is constructed, and accelerate national awareness of the ways in which whiteness and structural racism impact our country.
Whitney Dow
Whitney Dow is an award winning filmmaker who’s directing credits include: Two Towns of Jasper, I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v Board of Education, Unfinished Country and When the Drum is Beating. His’s producing credits include, Freedom Summer, Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks out of Town in America, and The Undocumented, Toots, and Among the Believers. His films have screened at festivals ranging from Sundance to Tribeca and IDFA, and been broadcast on networks around the world. His his work has been recognized with: the George Foster Peabody Award; Alfred I. duPont Award; Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award; and the Duke University Filmmaker Award as well as many film festival honors. He is the creator of the Facing Whiteness a story-based interactive public media project and Story Director for Veterans Coming Home a public media digital initiative designed to help bridge the military/civilian divide. He is a Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics and teaches filmmaking and interactive storytelling at Hunter College in New York City.