Michelle Parkerson

Michelle Parkerson
Michelle Parkerson reading at a tribute to Essex Hemphill, Mt. Pleasant Library, Washington D.C., 2014
Born	Washington, DC, US
Occupation	Filmmaker and academic

Michelle Parkerson is an American filmmaker and academic. She is an assistant professor in Film and Media Arts at Temple University and has been an independent film/video maker since the 1980s, focusing particularly on feminist, LGBT and political activism and issues.

Michelle Parkerson was born and raised in Washington, DC. In the early 1980s, Parkerson and Essex Hemphill, a poet, activist, and friend of Parkerson's, would often perform spoken word poetry in D.C. coffeehouses and theaters. They received a grant from the Washington Project for the Arts in 1983 to produce an "experimental dramatization" of their poetry entitled Murder on Glass.

She is an alumna of the American Film Institute (AFI) Workshop for Women Directors, Class of 1989-91, where her classmates included Rita Mae Brown and Lyn Goldfarb.

Parkerson currently heads her own DC-based production company, Eye of the Storm Productions.

Parkerson has received grants from the Independent Television Service, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the AFI as well as a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. She was awarded the Prix du Public at the Festival International de Créteil Films de Femmes and the Audience and Best Biography Awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her films are distributed by Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel.

She is assistant professor in Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

She published a volume of poetry, Waiting Rooms, in 1983.

Gibson describes Parkerson as "a visionary risk taker". Gibson describes Parkerson's films as being identity-related: "highlight[ing] the identities of black women as performers and social activists… serv[ing] as a major contributor to the development of a black documentary style that seeks a holistic approach to African-American life".