MFA Film Students Keith Nixon and Desirae Lee, Sundance Film Festival, 2019
For information on applying to Howard University’s MFA Film Program, please contact the Office of Graduate Admission, HUGSAdmission@howard.edu.
The only MFA in Film at an HBCU, Howard Graduate Film Program fosters diverse storytelling through global independent cinema.
‘Culture’, ‘community’, ‘family’ and ‘empowerment’ are all intrinsic to the graduate film experience at Howard University. For nearly forty years, Howard Graduate Film faculty and students have worked collectively to form a safe space for diverse storytelling, while recognizing the social and political impact of cinematic representations on identity and culture.
Founded by black filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion and New York’s Black Independents, Howard Graduate Film Program continues to fulfill the legacy of these artistic movements as part of the larger history of independent filmmaking in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and within diaspora communities globally. We teach all graduate film students the major areas of film production including screenwriting, producing, directing, cinematography, editing and sound, to encourage a holistic approach to independent filmmaking. Howard Graduate Film students also take courses in film studies including African Cinema, African American Cinema and critical discourses in postcolonial Third Cinema. Amongst film schools nationally and internationally, Howard University distinguishes itself as the only graduate film program that brings together a technical film production education with critical issues of race and representation globally.
“‘I was leaving home for the first time and I was looking for a community,’ he [Young] explained. “A friend of mine, Montré Missouri, and another friend of mine, Kim Gaines, saw me in the hallway one day and dragged me to the Howard University film office, and said, ‘You know, you’re looking a little lonely brother, you’re looking a little lost. Here goes your family here.’”
- Bradford Young, Academy Award Nominee Howard MFA Film Alumus (in Ebony Magazine, February 2017)
“If you know this is what you do and there’s a school that can help you get deeper into it, I would recommend ‘Howard University Film School’ which is an incredibly good school and which will really marry the craft of cinema with your culture…”
- Ava DuVernay, BlackStar Film Festival
Professor Emeritus Haile Gerima
Founding Faculty of Howard University Graduate Film Program on the L.A. Rebellion Movement
“We all felt that we had nothing in common with this Eurocentric paradigm of representation or theater or movies”. “And so we were opting to look at Latin American films, African films, Iranian films, trying to find our own identity and empower the very stories we set out to want to tell. “
"Howard University and Visualizing Blackness": 30th Anniversary of the Howard MFA Film Program
On Howard in developing a black film aesthetic: “Jazz…has brought a lot to black filmmakers than anything else in the world.” “In the Jazz music, you find the aesthetic. In Blues, in Gospel, you find the aesthetics.”
- Professor Haile Gerima
On cultural diversity and film students at Howard: “You may be teaching me about Oscar Micheaux but I’m going to see how I apply Oscar Micheaux to what it is that I want to say about Iranian identity or what it is that I want to say about Indian identity.”
- Dr. Montré Aza Missouri