Fiscal Sponsee - The Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award
The Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award
The Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award extends the philanthropic goals of the Thread LLC by supporting charitable activities and making grants to individuals who embody the social and media activism of Marsha Turner Taylor, who at 15 years old, helped launch and grow the Free Breakfast for Children Program, created by the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA in the late 1960s. Her family now lives in the Pacific Northwest where the Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award is based. The Award acknowledges youth media artists with a unique vantage point to a game-changing moment in history, and who use their position to make the world a better place.
For example, the Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award wishes to provide support to people who use media to shine the light on important issues regarding racism, sexism, economic justice, and other forms of oppression, and highlight ways that we as a civilization can strive to be and do better. Specifically, the Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award provides a cash prize and video equipment for them to produce a documentary on their experience, and ways that they feel we can envision a positive change for the future. Award recipients receive mentorship and technical support to complete their documentaries within one year of receiving their award, and we arrange for them to premiere their documentary at Northwest Film Forum.
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Michelle Flowers-Taylor, Ed.D. is a documentary filmmaker, and an educator with expertise in promoting cross-cultural education through research, media, and service. She has served as an applied anthropologist with specialized training in the visual aspects of culture to develop interactive and educational video game-based content that taught the languages and cultures of various parts of the world for the U.S. military. Her work has garnered the U.S. Distance Learning Award and has taken her to several countries including Australia, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, and various locations in the U.S. She completed her doctoral research at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA, where she conducted narrative analysis research with academically high-achieving African American female students to assess the language and literacy strategies that they have used to excel in school and in their roles as community leaders. In 2015, she applied her research by raising $1 million in seed capital to establish the Institute of Engineering Community and Cultural Competence at the University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering. Dr. Flowers-Taylor founded the Thread—a newly formed media collective that provides an interactive platform for emerging BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) documentary filmmakers, viewers, funders, and distributors who wish to support their work—and the annual Marsha Turner Taylor Visionary Award.
ABOUT THE THREAD
Founded by documentary filmmaker and visual anthropologist, Dr. Michelle Flowers-Taylor, the Thread is a newly formed media collective that provides an interactive platform for emerging BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) documentary filmmakers, viewers, funders, and distributors who wish to support their work.
People of color are critical threads in the fabric of this nation, and that is why we founded the Thread to help documentary filmmakers to share, gain feedback, fundraise, and gain distribution for their projects.
The Thread gives filmmakers the opportunity to take their projects to the next level. By posting their documentary films and hosting on-line meetups and professional development sessions with established and emerging industry professionals, funders, and distributors, the Thread creates the connections to remove the barriers to empower the next generation of BIPOC filmmakers for success in the digital media industry of the 21st century.
In the past, these resources were scarcely available, but with the growing number of BIPOC documentary filmmakers and a growing demand for our multilayered stories, we aim to share knowledge and increase access to support and resources to build the largest collective of BIPOC media creators in the world.