Abiyi Ford
Abraham "Abiyi" Ford (1935–2018)[1] was an Ethiopian-American film educator and filmmaker.
Early life and education[edit]
Ford was born and raised in Ethiopia. His parents, Mignon Inniss Ford and Arnold Josiah Ford, moved to Ethiopia in the early 1930s as diasporic Blacks interested in pan-Africanism.[2] Arnold Ford was a colleague of Marcus Garvey and a leader in the University Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s.
Ford attended Piney Woods Junior College outside Jackson, Mississippi and then joined the US Air Force. He attended Columbia University for undergraduate and graduate work, where he received an MFA.[3]
Career[edit]
He was a professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University.[4] He helped establish the graduate film program program along with African American filmmaker Alonzo Crawford and Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima.[5] This program became an important training ground and community of independent Black filmmakers.[3] Students included the artist Arthur Jafa.[6] He described his motivation for this work in an interview in 1993, saying "Film is the most powerful tool of social influence that man has ever known . . . I strongly feel the need to wield the power of film the awful damages done to the images of peoples of non-Western culture."[7]
An article about Ford from 1983 noted that
"Although Ford has made some films through the years (an educational series for New York's Bank Street College of Education, some short experimental ventures, a documentary on the First Pan African Cultural Festival in Algeria in 1969), he is known primarily for his work as a teacher and a theoretician of film."[8]
After his retirement from Howard University in 2006, he joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism and Communications at Addis Ababa University.[9]
Filmography[edit]
- Lois Mailou Jones: Fifty Years of Painting (1983)[10][11]
- Burkina Faso: Land of the People of Dignity (1988) – documentary produced in partnership with Fanta Regina Nacro of the Institut d'Education Cinématographique de Ouagadougou (INAFEC), in Burkina Faso.[12][13]
References[edit]
- ^ "In Memory of Emeritus Professor Abraham [Abiy] Ford Department of Radio, Television and Film in the School of Communications And Addis Ababa University Schools and Department of Journalism and Performance Arts and Film". Capital Newspaper. 2018-05-29. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
- ^ Jayawardane, M. Neelika; Muluneh, Aida (2016). "Between Nostalgia and Future Dreaming". Transition (120): 116–131. doi:10.2979/transition.120.1.12. ISSN 0041-1191. JSTOR 10.2979/transition.120.1.12.
- ^ a b Hall, Carla (1988-04-14). "THE AUTEURS OF HOWARD". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
- ^ "Abraham Abiyi Rock Ford | WorldCat.org". search.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
- ^ "Howard Graduate Film FAQs (Copy)". Howard Graduate Film. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
- ^ Vogt, Naomi (2022-04-13). "Editing Chills". New Left Review (133/134): 161–177.
- ^ Klotman, Phyllis Rauch; Cutler, Janet K. (1999). Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21347-1.
- ^ Scarupa, Harriet (1983-04-01). "The Image Messengers: Filmmakers at Howard". New Directions. 10 (3).
- ^ "Condolences Message | Addis Ababa University". www.aau.edu.et. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
- ^ Jones, Lois Mailou (1992). "Paintings of Three Continents". The Georgia Review. 46 (2): 278–288. ISSN 0016-8386. JSTOR 41400295.
- ^ Ferguson, Eve (1983-06-19). "50 years of Painting'". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
- ^ Klotman, Phyllis Rauch; Gibson, Gloria J. (1997). Frame by Frame II: A Filmography of the African American Image, 1978-1994. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21120-0.
- ^ Ellerson, Beti (2019-04-26), "African Women in Film, the Moving Image, and Screen Culture", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.496, ISBN 978-0-19-027773-4, retrieved 2023-11-29