CORNELL PROFESSORS TAO LEIGH GOFFE AND JEFFREY PALMER LAUNCH DARK LABORATORY, AN ENGINE FOR BLACK AND INDIGENOUS MEDIA STORYTELLING AND RURAL ECOLOGY, ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY (OCTOBER 12, 2020)
Dark Laboratory is a new humanities incubator on Black and American Indian Rural Lives –– founded by two professors at Cornell University.
Ithaca, NY – September 28, 2020 – Two Cornell University professors, Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer, will host a virtual block party to launch the website for their much-anticipated new initiative DARK LABORATORY, a humanities incubator on Black and Indigenous immersive digital storytelling, theory, and design, on October 12, 2020 at 7PM EST.
The duo –a PhDJ (professor and DJ) Tao Leigh Goffe, and Emmy Award- nominated filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer, received funding from a Mellon Foundation initiative at Cornell University that centers ‘Black Rural Lives’ and invites a global conversation about Indigenous lives and the questions of stolen land and stolen life. Its primary mission is to provide a network to fund artists and other community-driven forms of knowledge production wherein universities can listen to and learn from members of local Indigenous and Black communities.
Supported by the Rural Humanities at Cornell University, DARK LABORATORY is an engine for examining and supporting Black and Indigenous relationality in all of its tension and coalition-building. DARK LABORATORY is supported by an Advisory Board comprising industry professionals ranging from academia, to film, to technology. Members include, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard, Finding Your Roots), N. Bird Runningwater (Filmmaker, Indigenous Program at the Sundance Institute) Stanley Nelson (Filmmaker, Firelight Media), Ruha Benjamin (Princeton), Kamal Sinclair (Guild of Future Architects), Fred Moten (NYU), Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty (Cornell, Associate University Librarian), Tracy K. Smith (Princeton, United States Poet Laureate), Circe Sturm (University of Texas, Austin), Tracy Rector (Filmmaker, Longhouse Media), Simone Browne (University of Texas, Austin), and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto).
The event is sponsored by the Cornell Rural Humanities Initiative from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
