Obie award-winning teacher, performer, and artist Roger Guenveur Smith will spend a week-long residency at the College of Charleston from January 8-15, 2011. “Roger Guenveur Smith: Tracing History” will include tutorials, performances, workshops and film screenings open to the public with the goal of reflecting on South Carolina’s living history and memory. The Film Studies and African American Studies Programs have received a grant from The Humanities Council SC to make the residency possible.

“The College of Charleston is committed in engaging its students and the broader community in humanistic inquiry, including the exploration of human interactions that trigger questions about who we are and what kinds of communities we comprise,” says David Moscowitz, interim director of the Film Studies Program and assistant professor of communication. “Rather than simply performing on campus, Smith will work with our students and discuss, along with members of his extended family, his multicultural Charleston roots.”

Workshops will be held for Smith to coach students through the process of examining historical events and people, interpreting and decoding archival and historical materials, and creating narrative from the information. He will invite members of the larger Charleston community to participate in discussions about how cultural memory and identity are depicted in his film performances, which foreground American racial history and tensions. Smith provides an opportunity for people to come together around issues that typically keep them apart.

Roger Guenveur Smith has taught at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Macalester College. His solo performance of “A Huey P. Newton Story” was distinguished with an Obie Award and adapted into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm, directed by longtime colleague, Spike Lee. Smith’s many film credits include Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” for which Smith created the stuttering hero, Smiley. “Malcolm X,” “He Got Game,” “Get on the Bus,” and “Summer of Sam,” as well as “Eve’s Bayou,” “Deep Cover,” “King of New York,” “Hamlet,” “All About the Benjamins,” and “American Gangster,” for which Smith was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award.

A complete schedule of events will be available in December 2010. For more information, contact David Moscowitz at 843.953.7017.