Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart: Lorraine Hansberry

Tracy Strain is an award-winning filmmaker and film/video director, producer, writer, and consultant with over 28 years of experience. Lorraine Hansberry was one of her earliest role models, and her film Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart: Lorraine Hansberry is the first feature documentary about the artist. She was coordinating producer for the American Experience episode The Mine Wars, which tells the story of West Virginia coal miners’ uprisings in the early 20th century. In 2004, she braved the Canadian Rockies and Yukon Territory to produce and direct Building the Alaska Highway for American Experience.

She also produced, wrote, and directed two one-hour documentaries for Blackside’s 1999 Peabody Award-winning, six-part PBS series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts. The films profiled Paul Robeson, Augusta Savage, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, James Baldwin, black ballet dancers in the 1950s and 1960s, and included a segment about Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

Randall MacLowry works as an editor as well as producer and director and has won two Writers Guild of America Awards for documentaries. His most recent producing and directing credits are The Rise and Fall of Penn Station and Silicon Valley, both for American Experience. Among his many editing credits is Reconstruction: America’s Second Civil War for American Experience.