Claire Andrade-Watkins

Professor Emerita, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies

Emeritus

At Emerson since 1982

Campus

Boston

Department

Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts

Education

  • B.A., Simmons College
  • M.A., Boston University
  • Ph.D., Boston University

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 <em>Our Rhode</em>, 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, <em>Research in African Literature</em>, <em>The Independent Film and Video Monthly</em>, <em>American Historical Review</em>, and <em>CinémAction</em>. She has held academic appointments at Brown University and Emerson College.

<a href=”https://downthepoint.com/”>Down the Point</a>