TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His works include the documentaries The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets, and TCB – the Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing. At Scribe, he has developed production methodologies that assist first-time makers author their own stories. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” fellowship and many other honors. 

Monica Henriquez is a Venezuelan/Dutch filmmaker based in the UK. She trained at the BBC in the 1980s and has worked as editor/director on documentaries about  North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa for European and US broadcasters. She is the editor and co-director of TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing. For over 2 decades, she has been filming and building a digital archive on Venezuela in the times of Hugo Chavez and beyond. 

Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural and educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023). At the CUNY Graduate Center, they are a 2023–25 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and are on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Coco is co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), and is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Makeba Lavan is an Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College. Her research focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism/Speculative Fiction and Popular Culture. Makeba’s intellectual musings have been published in Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies and Modern Language Studies. As part of Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, she co-edited “Realizing the Dream of A Black University,” & Other Writings, a collaborative publication of Toni Cade Bambara’s teaching materials from CUNY and Spelman College. Her current project explores the ways in which writers and artists of the African diaspora use speculative fiction to imagine and thus create better futures for Black people.

Toni (Miltona Mirkin) Bambara was born on March 25, 1939 in Harlem, New York, where she spent her childhood immersed in neighborhood learning and performance spaces. She studied at Queens College and City College of New York, CUNY, where she also taught, before going to Livingston College in New Jersey. In 1974, Bambara moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she began to write full-time and teach in homes, community centers, and various campuses. In 1985, she again moved to Philadelphia, where she nurtured the rise of Black independent cinema. Throughout her life, the prolific writer produced a wide array of fiction, essays, screenplays, anthologies, and film treatments. Bambara died of colon cancer on December 9, 1995, at the age of 56.