Claire Andrade-Watkins
Professor Emerita, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins is a filmmaker and scholar whose career as a distinguished scholar of colonial and post-colonial francophone and lusophone African cinema spans decades. An award-winning director and filmmaker, her work focuses on the Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean community in Rhode Island, the first settlement of voluntary immigrants who arrived on Cape Verdean-owned packets at the end of the 19th century.
Andrade-Watkins is the founding director and vice-president of the Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean Heritage Place Project Inc., a community-based research initiative created in 2007, and president of SPIA Media Productions, Inc., a production and distribution company founded in 1998 specializing in media from the African diaspora. Her current digital archival projects include Our Rhode, a beta digital mapping/chronological timeline that reconstitutes the history of Rhode Island’s first Cape Verdean neighborhood in the Fox Point waterfront area of Providence, Rhode Island.
Andrade-Watkins has had official festival selections of documentary and experimental films at Hot Docs (Toronto), Athens International Film & Video Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, FESTin, and FESPACO. She was the past recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in Cape Verde, and an American Philosophical Society grant, and she has been published in the Society for Visual Anthropology, Research in African Literature, The Independent Film and Video Monthly, American Historical Review, and CinémAction. She has held academic appointments at Brown University and Emerson College.