Research Guides: Streaming Media: Theme: Creators

Theme: CREATORS

UCI Libraries wants to help you discover, learn about, and celebrate people and ideas that history has overlooked because of the color of their skin, gender identity, or sexual orientation. This series, ReWatching History: Uncovering Diversity in Our Past, will point to streaming videos already in our collection that you can watch anytime.

This page focuses on CREATORS. These people have made, invented, written, produced, etc. works that we might already know about, but might know little about the actual person behind their creation. From Ballet Negres, the first Black ballet company in Britain, to Charles Drew, an African American doctor and researcher who pioneered new developments in blood work, to Hedy Lamarr, famous actress, but little known for her inventions that some credit as being a predecessor to Bluetooth technology. We hope that you enjoy discovering more about these overlooked people!

Arts & Humanities

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
ART. Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist. Often referred to as China’s the most famous artist, his words usually focus on human rights issues, often including video works.
Ballet Negres: A Documentary
DANCE. A documentary about Britain's first all-black ballet company, Ballet Negres. It was founded in the 1940s by Berto Pasuka.
Black Is...Black Ain't
FILM STUDIES. AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. This documentary “jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating. Is there an essential Black identity? Is there a litmus test defining the real Black man and true Black woman?
Carroll Spinney: I am Big Bird
FILM. An affectionate portrait of Caroll Spinney, the beloved puppeteer responsible for creating worldwide icons out of Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch for the last 45 years.
China 21
ASIAN STUDIES. FILM STUDIES. a documentary film created by a Chinese American female director, Ruby Yang, records intimate portraits of ordinary people from four small Chinese families struggling in tumultuous times, centered on their only children.
Creating Community: Coming Out: A 50 Year History
HISTORY: This documentary features young people interviewing LGBTQ elders who have come out over the past 70 years.
Creating Stories: The Cloth Sings To Me
HISTORY. This short video features women quilters who integrate African fabrics into their work and the history of this storytelling tradition.
Creating the Self: Black Dandy: A Political Beauty
HISTORY. This documentary traces the lineage of flamboyant fashion and style in African diasporic communities.
Curator/Novelist: The Foreigner's Home
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES.
Jack Soto: Water Flowing Together
DANCE. This documentary looks over the career of Jack Soto, a gay ballet dancer and choreographer of Native American/Hispanic descent,. He was a principal dancer with New York City Ballet for decades and was influenced by many traditional dances, like the Navajo Hoop Dance taught to him by his mother, through his many years of performance.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
ART. Jean-Michel Basquiat was constantly confronted by racism and misconceptions throughout his life. Tragically died at the tender age of 27, Basquiat nevertheless made a lasting mark with his eccentric paintings.
Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Hearts
DRAMA. This documentary sheds valuable light on all aspects of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception.
Lydia Mendoza: Chulas Fronteras
MUSIC. A complex, insightful look at the Chicano experience as mirrored in the lives and music of the most acclaimed Norteno musicians of the Texas-Mexican border, including Flaco Jimenez and Lydia Mendoza. Selected for The Library Of Congress, National Film Registry of motion pictures.
Maria Irene Fornes: The Rest I Make Up
DRAMA. Maria Irene Fornes was one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds on-stage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards.
Mothers' Way, Daughters' Choice
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES. A semi-autobiography documentary by Kyoko Gasha (清水京子), who is a new immigrant from Japan and now a report and producer for Thomson Reuters in New York City. In the film, she shows how she struggled as a non-traditional Japanese wife/mother when working in Japan and how she and a few other Japanese American women strived to quit being Japanese to be able to survive and prosper in the U.S..
Paul Robeson: Singer
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. MUSIC. In 1940 Paul Robeson was one of the most famous people in the world. Find out why many people have never heard of him.
Secrecy: Help Me to Understand
ART. This tape investigates the media's portrayal of African American males, specifically the use of stereotypes in such cases as the Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson trials. Jenkins responds to the ceaseless televisual repetition of images from such events by constructing this tape as a 25-minute loop of one 5-minute segment. Secrecy: Help Me to Understand investigates the question of discrimination in the media from different cultural and historical perspectives
Sonia Sanchez: Playwright & Poet
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. DRAMA. Interview with renown Black feminist poet Sonia Sanchez.
they came riding into town on BLACK & SILVER HORSES
ART. In this provocative video essay on racism, crime, the law and the media, Andrews constructs a layered pastiche to investigate these issues within cultural and personal contexts. He explores how the fictions of the media reinforce and perpetuate racial mythologies.
Through a Lens Darkly
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. This documentary explores the role photography plays in shaping Black identity throughout U.S. history.
Young Jean Lee: The Shipment
DRAMA. Playwright and director Young Jean Lee and a cast of 5 African-American performers create an unsettling terrain of well-trodden stereotypes that dare audiences to laugh as they consider their own preconceptions about race and culture. One of the leading and most provocative voices in American contemporary theater, Lee pushes herself to new artistic heights as she confronts her fear about creating an ethnic identity play through the lens of a “black identity politics show.”
인플루엔자 = Influenza
FILM STUDIES. ASIAN STUDIES. A short documentary by Bong Joon-ho, the 2020 Oscar best director. In this earlier documentary by Bong uses footage, in a chronological order, from security cameras located around Seoul city to show the psychological and moral downward spiral of “Mr. Cho” from a low social class.

Social Sciences

Am I too African to be American? Am I too American to be African?
SOCIOLOGY. AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. How does race influence cultural identify? This film explores issues that divide African and Black American people in the US, including internalized prejudices and a lack of community, especially if you are African living in the US and navigating what it means to be "African-American."
Banished
SOCIOLOGY. AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES. BANISHED vividly recovers the too-quickly forgotten history of racial cleansing in America when thousands of African Americans were driven from their homes and communities by violent, racist mobs. The film places these events in the context of present day race relations by following three concrete cases where black and white citizens warily explore if there is common ground for reconciliation over these expulsions.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
Revisit the turbulent 1960s, when a new revolutionary culture emerged with the Black Panther Party at the vanguard. Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement that feels timely all over again.
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
ENTREPRENEURSHIP. ENGINEERING. Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr fled an oppressive marriage to create a name for herself as one of Hollywood's top leading ladies in the 1940s. Behind the glamour and sex appeal, though, was a talented and inquisitive inventor who created a radio system that is now considered the basis of Bluetooth technology.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
CRIMINOLOGY. SOCIOLOGY. An essential documentary, Brett Story's incisive, investigative and wide-ranging THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is an examination of the prison and its place - social, economic and psychological - in American society.
Two dollars and a Dream: Madam C.J. Walker
ENTREPRENEURSHIP. BUSINESS. This is a biography of Madam C.J. Walker, the child of slaves freed by the Civil War, who became America's first self-made millionairess.

Engineering, Medicine, & Sciences

AfroDigital: The Origins of Computing Technology in Africa
MATH. TECHNOLOGY. The documentary asserts that computing technology may in fact be indigenous to Africa. The new field of ethno-mathematics has discovered the oldest calculating tool in the world in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa.
Charles Drew: Revolutionized Medical Science
MEDICINE. Charles Drew born 1904, was an African American physician and medical researcher who revolutionized the field of medicine with developments in blood work.
A Dangerous Idea
BIOLOGY. A DANGEROUS IDEA: EUGENICS, GENETICS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM reveals how this dangerous idea gained new traction in the 20th century with an increasing belief in the concept of an all-powerful 'gene' that predetermines who is worthy and who is not.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams: First Black Heart Surgeon in America
MEDICINE. Daniel Hale Williams was an African American cardiologist that performed the first successful open heart surgery. He also founded Provident Hospital, the first non segregated hospital in the U.S. Dr. Williams was an extraordinary man of incredible talent and merit and his exceptional accomplishments are documented with great care in this inspiring program.
Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War
NURSING. During her evening ward rounds, the famous nurse talks about the lack of medical knowledge in the Crimean field hospital in which she's working. She describes the risk of infection to the patients, and her hopes for developing modern nursing methods that might save more lives in the future.
History of Nursing: The Development of a Profession
NURSING: This film also deals with certain themes that are important to nurses everywhere in the world, gender roles, war, discrimination, and labour struggle. Also pay attention to the complex relationship between medicine and nursing
Transgender Tuesdays
MEDICINE. They came for the hormones and stayed for the healthcare. These are the pioneering patients of the first free clinic in the country for trans folks, 1993 in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.