Film & Media Studies

Hattie Noel was a trailblazer of the stand-up comedy form. While the visual archive shows her constrained in the controlling images of Disney’s hippo and Hollywood’s maid, her comedy albums tell a different story of Black representation.

Somewhere between the virtuosic parodies of Frank Zappa and the screwball wit of Monty Python, the Firesign Theatre reinvented the comedy album in the 1960s and ’70s. Jeremy Braddock explores their legacy.

For decades, our own Patricia Aufderheide—who founded this organization’s precursor, the Center for Social Media—has chronicled, studied, and impacted the global community of documentary storytellers who seek to speak truth to power and uphold democracy. In her new book, Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy (University of California Press), she brings readers into the six-decade history and living story of the longest-running independent documentary production organization in the United States, Kartemquin Films.