November 6, 2024 6:30 pm
Town Hall Seattle, Livestream (Hybrid)
Pay What You WillAvailableRecordedComing Soon CART Captioning
Spend an evening with film director and writer Raymond “Boots” Riley, of Sorry to Bother You, and I’m a Virgo, fame and UW Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, Dr. Golden M. Owen, for a conversation on making movies, rapping, storytelling, and activism.
About the speaker
Raymond “Boots” Riley
Director, Activist, Screenwriter, Producer, Poet, Rapper, and Speaker
Boots Riley is a director, activist, screenwriter, producer, poet, rapper, and speaker.
His directorial debut film, Sorry to Bother You, premiered to strong critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. By embedding messages regarding economic and class critique as well as politically progressive movement building into dystopian science fiction satire, Sorry to Bother You brought issues surrounding income inequality into wide public discussion in the United States and abroad.
His 2023 seven-part series, absurdist comedy I’m A Virgo, received critical acclaim. The series features a 13ft tall Black man who lives in Oakland, California and includes EMMY award winning actor, Jharrel Jerome along with Mike Epps, Carmen Ejogo, Kara Young, and many others.
A dedicated community-based activist, Mr. Riley was deeply involved with the Occupy Oakland movement and was one of the leaders of the activist group The Young Comrades. He is also the founding member and lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club featuring Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of essays Tell Homeland Security-We Are the Bomb.
About the moderator
Golden M. Owens
Assistant Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies Department
Golden M. Owens is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at UW. Seattle. She researches and teaches about race and representation, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project examines intelligent virtual assistants and platforms such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and ChatGPT, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States. The project demonstrates this haunting through analyzing popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.
Dr. Owens’ work appears in Sounding Out! and has been accepted by the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (via the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine), the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (f.k.a. the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University’s Office of Fellowships, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Sponsoring Departments: The Graduate School, and Cinema and Media Studies