TCB- The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing: Film Screening and Conversation

Join us at the Rio Theatre (1205 Soquel Ave, Santa Cruz, CA 95062) for a Free screening of TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, followed by a conversation with one of the film’s directors and producers, Louis Massiah, and with Professor Gina Dent.

TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 minutes) is a biography of the influential writer, filmmaker and cultural worker, who with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. The film is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara’s life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students.

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, He has developed production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 150 documentaries; Muslim Voices of Philadelphia; The Great Migration – A City Transformed, and The Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets.

Massiah’s documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, Cecil B. Moore, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown and TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing.

Gina Dent (Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Professor of Humanities and Faculty Director of the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has won awards for her teaching (Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award), advocacy (Chancellor’s Award for Diversity), and research (Innovator of the Year).

Currently, she serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Director for Visualizing Abolition, a multidisciplinary project—involving exhibitions, events, fellowships, and academic programs—addressing the global crisis of incarceration through art and visual culture. Her recent collaborative projects grow out of her decades-long work as a social justice advocate—Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Haymarket 2022), and Seeing through Stone (exhibition catalog, Marquand 2024). She works with several organizations nationally and internationally, including Columbia University’s Center for Justice and Australia’s Sisters Inside, primarily on justice-related concerns.

Professor Dent has offered graduate courses and faculty seminars in black feminisms, critical race studies, critical theory and postcolonialism, and legal theory and visual culture in Brazil (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador and Universidade Federal Recôcavo da Bahia, Cachoeira), Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Sweden (Linköping University), as well as at the European Graduate School, and lectures widely on these and other subjects. She previously held positions at Princeton University and Columbia University and was Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at UCSC, as well as Principal Investigator for the University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice.