Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart: Lorraine Hansberry

Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart tells the dramatic story of Lorraine Hansberry, the young, gifted and black woman who chose words to fight injustice—on stage and off.

Lorraine Hansberry at typewriter, from Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart
Series
American Masters
Premiere Date
January 19, 2018
Length
120 minutes
Funding Initiative
Series and Special Projects
Diversity Development Fund
  • Award laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2018 Peabody Awards-George Foster Peabody Award
  • Headshot of Tracy H Strain
    Director/Producer

    Tracy H Strain

    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 Show more 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. Show less

    Headshot of Randall MacLowry
    Producer

    Randall MacLowry

    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.

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    The Film

    At a time when women, people of color, and homosexuals were confined to the margins of society, Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), best known for A Raisin in the Sun, boldly challenged U.S. society to live up to its ideals. Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart tells the dramatic story of the young, gifted and black woman who chose words to fight injustice—on stage and off.

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