Marco Williams

Marco Williams is an award-winning filmmaker. He has been nominated three times for the Sundance Film Festival grand jury prize. He has spent his entire film career exploring the question of injustice, worldwide. He is a filmmaker whose films unmask the complexities of the human condition. A reviewer of his films shared: “you make films about the stories we prefer to keep hidden.”

His credits include: Murders that Matter (2023), A New Greenbook (Pilot), (2022), Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre (2021), Crafting an Echo (2018), Lonnie Holley: The Truth of the Dirt (2017), Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (2017), The Black Fives (2014), The Undocumented (2013), Inside the New Black Panthers (2009), Banished (2007), Freedom Summer (2006), I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education (2004), MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream (2003), Two Towns of Jasper (2002), Making Peace: Rebuilding our Communities (1996), Declarations: The Spiritual Deficit and The American Dream (1993), In Search of Our Fathers (1992), From Harlem to Harvard (1982).

Williams films have screened at Sundance, Berlin, Hot Docs, Toronto, and numerous other festivals around the world. His films have been broadcast in the United States on PBS, History Channel, Nat Geo, and Discovery. Internationally they have screened on the BBC, The CBC, ABC, and in several other countries throughout the world.

His awards include Guggenheim Fellowship, a George Foster Peabody Award, the Beacon Award, the Alfred I duPont Silver Baton, the Pan African Film Festival Outstanding Documentary Award, the Full Frame Documentary Festival Spectrum Award, and the National Association of Black Journalists First Place Salute to Excellence Award, as well as an Emmy nomination for Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre.

Williams is also the Executive Producer on A Son’s Sacrifice, Bronx Princess, Bible Quiz, More than a Month, Pidgeon Kings, 93Queen, While I Breath, I Hope, The Big Payback, and IGUALADA.

Marco is a Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio, Film and Television and a Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. Prior to joining Northwestern, he was a professor at New York University at The Tisch School of the Arts, for twenty years. He also taught at The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking, Duke University, and The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Williams received a B.A. from Harvard University. He received a Master of Arts degree from UCLA in Afro-American Studies and a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA in their Producer’s Program.

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ABOUT CANADA LEE: NATIVE SON

Groundbreaking Black actor Canada Lee leveraged his fame to fight for civil rights. In 1947, he was blacklisted by the U.S. Government in retaliation for his progressive activism. (Produced by Kenny Kilfara and Jonathan Skurnik.)