Tracy Heather Strain and Randall MacLowry have won a Peabody Award for directing the critically-acclaimed documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.
The film was co-produced with Independent Television Service and Black Public Media in association with The Film Posse, Chiz Schultz Inc. and American Masters Pictures (PBS/WNET/TV).
Strain, who co-founded The Film Posse, Inc. with her husband MacLowry, spent more than 14 years raising money to develop the independently-produced film, which the couple produced with Strain serving as director and writer, and MacLowry and Chad Ervin as editors. Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart had its world premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and its television premiere on the PBS biography series American Masters in January 2018.
This is the director’s second Peabody Award win, with the first taking place in 1999 for her work on the six-part docuseries, I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts, produced by Blackside, Inc., in association with Thirteen/WNET for PBS.
Last month, Strain was presented with a 50th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture (Television), at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, for directing Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.
Since 2013, Strain has served as a Professor of the Practice in Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.
Peabody Award winners and nominees will be celebrated at a red-carpet event on Saturday, May 18 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York. Ronan Farrow, a contributing writer for The New Yorker and an investigative reporter and producer based at HBO, will serve as host.
The Peabody Awards Board of Jurors announced recently the documentary winners of the 30 total awards that represent the most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and digital media during 2018. The nominees were selected by a unanimous vote of 19 jurors from more than 1,200 entries from television, radio/podcasts and the web in entertainment, news, documentary, children’s and public service programming.
