- pcobb@uwm.edu
- Mitchell Hall B73A
Portia Cobb
- Associate Professor, Film, Video, Animation and New Genres
- Director, Community Media Project
Education
MA, San Francisco State University
BA, Communication, Mills College
Biography
Portia Cobb Joined the Film and Video faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1992 as an Assistant Professor and Artistic Director (1992-2009) of the school’s Community Media Project.
Currently she teaches both introductory and upper level production and cross-disciplinary contextual elective courses in the department ranging from Radical Black Cinemas; Experimental Ethnography, Community Documentary and Multicultural America-a service learning capstone course.
She studied Film production at San Francisco State University where the foundations of her continued practice as an interdisciplinary artist-creating in 16mm film, Digital Video, photography, Installation and plein air performance-were formed.
Focused on The Documentary, her experimental narratives explore the inner landscapes of identity, memory, history and place. Through her documentation of urban and rural communities in the Americas and West Africa she draws upon these themes as a means to confront forced forgetting and resettlement.
She is currently a principal researcher, leading the creative team for the UWM Voices of Gun Violence Archive with Department of Communication professors Leslie Harris, Erin M. Parcell and the founder of Mothers against Gun Violence, Debra Gillispie.