Lifetime Achievement Award

MADELINE ANDERSON

Lifetime Achievement Award

Madeline Anderson is a pioneering filmmaker and producer born in 1923 in Lancaster, PA. She is a ground-breaking television and documentary producer, film director, editor, screenwriter, activist, and mother of four.

Ms. Anderson is the second recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award which honors content creators originally from Pennsylvania who have made a significant impact in media.

“By the time that I graduated from high school in 1945 I had decided to become a filmmaker. My films would be about real people in real time in the struggle for equality. The purpose of the films would not only be to change the image of Black people, but my hope was that my films would both educate and activate Black people to stay in the struggle. It was almost an impossible dream, but I have been blessed to have made a small contribution.”

Ms. Anderson is best known for her films INTEGRATION REPORT 1 (1960), A TRIBUTE TO MALCOM X (1967), and I AM SOMEBODY (1970). In the 1970s, she was an in-house producer, director, and supervising film editor at Sesame Street and Electric Company. In 2015, the National Museum of African American History and Culture officially recognized INTEGRATION REPORT 1 as the first documentary film to be directed by an African American woman.

Honoring Madeline Anderson, page 40

“If film and television are electronic folklore, then Madeline is an honored elder, telling tales of ordinary lives lived with courage and dignity and good humor. She has, through her work, very simply, changed the world.”

- Kevin Hagopian, Festival Programmer & Teaching Professor