| Friday, November 30, 4 pm - Featured Panel: "Media as Art, Media as Activism: Feminism for the 21st Century."

Omonike Akinyemi is a local filmmaker and executive director of the Albany based independent film company, Image Quilt Productions. She is also an adjunct professor in the Women's Studies department here at the University at Albany. Akinyemi began making films as an undergraduate at Yale and received her MFA in filmmaking from the University of Southern California. She received an MTV Music/World Studio Foundation award for her first professional film, Medusa Talks, and premiered her award-winning feature film, Nelly's Bodega, at the Cannes Film Festival. She also directs for the stage and recently directed her original play, How to Stay Sane in Paris, off Broadway during the summer. Akinyemi has plans to adapt the play into a film. | Watch the trailer for Nelly's Bodega on YouTube.

Meredith LeVande is a singer/songwriter based in New York City who performs on the independent music and college circuits. She has produced two albums, Half Her and Through the Clouds, and is presently working on a third release, focusing on children's music. LeVande also lectures on college campuses on the subject of "Women, Pop Music, and Pornography," in which she raises awareness about the increasingly pornographic agenda of hyper-sexualizing women musicians, a trend that LeVande argues is linked to media consolidation, corporate media's investments in the lucrative pornography industry, and the ever growing dominance of media conglomerates that have squeezed out independent and community media. This lecture has recently been turned into an article, which is forthcoming in a special issue on "Women, Hip Hop, and Popular Music" for the refereed journal, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism.

LeVande's website | Listen to Music Sample: Half Her (Quicktime is needed).

Branda Miller is both a locally and internationally renowned media artist, educator, and community activist. She is Associate Professor of Electronic Arts and Media Literacy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the director of the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York. Miller has produced numerous experimental videos and art for over 20 years, collaborating with different community groups whom she empowers by offering them media tools to produce videos that document social problems in their communities. Her celebrated experimental videos include U & I Dot Com (1999), Witness to the Future (1995), a hybrid media project, and Time Squared (1988).

Miller's website | Watch video segment: Time Squared (Quicktime). | Listen to her interview on WRPI (Real Player).

Patricia Mohammed is a leading scholar in Caribbean Studies and feminist theory, a photographer, and filmmaker. She is Senior Lecturer and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of the West Indies, on the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad, as well as a visiting professor this fall semester at the University at Albany in the departments of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies and Women's Studies. Mohammed has pioneered significant scholarship on indigenous Caribbean feminisms, gender and development, and visual cultures. Her recent books include Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought and Gender in Caribbean Development. She has also made a short film, The Sign of the Loa, debuting in 2006, which concerns Haitian vodun iconography. Mohammed also curated with her partner, artist Rex Dixon, the art exhibit, The Caribbean in the Age of Modernity, which featured some of her art work, and serves on the editorial board for the open access online journal, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is presently working on a new book, Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation.