archives and research

beneath the water beneath the water is a multimedia archival project exploring Black American religion and spirituality. Click here for more information.

black american rural project an archival, photo, video, and documentary-based project centered on tracking and understanding rural life in modern America for Black Americans. This archive will be made public Fall 2026.

Stagecoach Road in Marshall, TX. Photo courtesy of Stephen. F Austin State University Center for Regional Heritage Research.

archive of black television films a one-of-a archive dedicated to curating an underexplored media form -television films - and how they helped shape and pioneer experimental black narrative. This archive will document the earliest Black television films from roughly 1968 or earlier to 2008, and serve as a place to access history, empherea, low-cost physical media, and online streaming, all in one place. This archive is in the research and development phase

Halle Berry in The Wedding (1998) dir. by Charles Burnett m(1e.

dreamgirl archive The Dreamgirl archive pulls from Y2K television, early internet culture, and vixen-era imagery that lived on MTV, VH1, and BET. Music videos, countdown shows, and reality TV shaped how desire was learned and performed long before social media had a name for it. The archive isn’t interested in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it lingers on what those images taught us and what they quietly took.

Curated alongside the short film, the Dreamgirl archive is made up of screenshots, magazine tears, tabloid clippings, chat-room memories, and personal keepsakes. Audiences are encouraged to contribute their own ephemera - things they saved, things they remember, things they can’t quite throw away. Together, it becomes a shared record of how desire, memory, and girlhood were shaped and stored.