ST. CLAIR C. BOURNE, xBSFS '65, is a producer/director/writer who has more than 33 productions to his credit through his company, The Chamba Organization including network, independent and educational films, political and cultural documentaries and dramatic films. His work has been seen on NBC, PBS, the Discovery Channel, British, Spanish, Canadian, Australian and Swedish television networks.
His films include:
St. Clair also produced In Motion Amiri Baraka (1989), an hour-long documentary covering Baraka from his early days in Greenwich Village to his present literary and political activities. It focuses on the final two weeks before his sentencing in a Federal court on the charge of resisting arrest.
St. Clair is also creating a documentary about the role of African-Americans in the American West.
In addition to his own projects, he is the Executive Producer for Kathe Sandler's A Question of Color, broadcast over PBS. The program explores skin color discrimination within the Black community.
St. Clair has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, and a Revson Fellowship from Columbia University. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at the Cineclube Estacao in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
His 90-minute documentary John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. The film is "an engrossing biography of a formidable thinker and scholar whom most people have probably never heard of." The film presents African history as seen through the eyes of Clarke (pictured above), a very original African-American thinker.
St. Clair is also city editor of the New York Age, and is the author of "The African American Image in American Cinema" in Black Scholar.