Documenting Blackness on the Mexico-U.S. Border

Please join us for our second event for our speaker series “Solidarity and Belonging Beyond Borders,” with our esteemed speaker,  Ebony Bailey,  documentary filmmaker whose work explores cultural intersections, diaspora and social movements. The event will feature a documentary screening of Bailey's "Life Between Borders: Black Migrants in Mexico."

Ebony Bailey is a documentary filmmaker based in the U.S.-Mexico border whose work explores cultural intersections, diaspora and social movements. Her documentaries have screened at film festivals and universities in the US, Latin America and Europe. Ebony is a recipient of the Latino Emerging Filmmakers Fellowship with Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB). She was also selected for the Tomorrow's Filmmakers Today program by HBO and Hola Mexico Film Festival. Her documentaries have won awards at the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards, the San Diego Latino Film Festival, the South Social Film Festival, among other accolades. She is a recipient of the Fondo Miradas with Ambulante and Netflix. She currently works as a cinematographer for the PBS series Roadtrip Nation. Ebony received her Bachelor’s degree in Print and Digital Journalism at the University of Southern California and studied her Master’s in Documentary Film at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As a “Blaxican,” Ebony tells stories with the intention of representing her communities and building spaces of empowerment.

The Penn Migration Initiative was created to advance and promote interdisciplinary scholarship, original research, and intellectual exchange among stakeholders interested in immigration policy and immigrant communities. This academic year, we are launching a speaker series, “Solidarity and Belonging Beyond Borders,” which will bring together border scholars, journalists, policy leaders, community advocates, and artists to discuss their initiatives and research projects that humanize the people and communities in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

The event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!