About:

Changing the World, One Wall at a Time tells the story of Education Is Not A Crime – one of the world’s largest street art and human rights campaign to raise awareness of education discrimination by Iran’s government against tens of thousands of young Bahá’ís.

The film features interviews with popular street artists from around the world – as well as activists with experience of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, and human rights work on behalf of Iranians of all backgrounds. Iranian Bahá’ís with personal experience of being denied their right to higher education also share their stories.

The Screening will be followed by a panel discussion with, Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Assistant Professor of American Studies, UMD, College Park, Audra Buck-Coleman, Associate Professor and Graphic Design Program Director at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, UMD, College Park.

Speakers:

LA MARR JURELLE BRUCE

La Marr Jurelle Bruce is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, critical theorist, Afromanticist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.Winner of the 2014 Joe Weixlmann Award from African American Review, Dr. Bruce has work featured or forthcoming in American Quarterly; No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Duke University Press); Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies; and TDR: The Drama Review. Dr. Bruce’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia; the Ford Foundation; the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University; the Graduate School at the University of Maryland; the Mellon Foundation; the Social Science Research Council; and the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement at Duke University.

AUDRA BUCK-COLEMAN

Audra Buck-Coleman is an Associate Professor and Graphic Design Program Director at the University of Maryland. She has written, art directed, curated, designed, authored, directed, and collaborated on numerous design projects including Sticks + Stones, an international multi-university collaborative graphic design project that investigates stereotyping and social issues. Her design research focuses on social design, social design assessment mechanisms, and the ways art and design can create positive change in communities. Her social design education initiatives have been recognized both nationally in 2017 for the Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards and internationally by Core77 in 2011 and 2017. She holds an MFA in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Maryland.

CATHERINE KNIGHT STEELE

Catherine Knight Steele is a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. Her research has appeared in the Howard Journal of Communications and the book Intersectional Internet (S.U. Noble and B. Tynes Eds.) Her doctoral dissertation, Digital Barbershops, focused heavily on the black blogosphere and the politics of online counterpublics. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Dr. Steele also serves as the first Project Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded College of Arts and Humanities grant, Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture.