Pearl Bowser

rdf:langString Pearl Bowser

rdf:langString Pearl Bowser (born 1931) is an author, television director, film director, producer, and film archivist. She is the author of a book on the first ten years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She is thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She is the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey includes teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s. Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers. In 2012, Bowser gifted her library of films to the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American Media Arts. These are maintained by Earl W. and Amanda Stafford and can be found at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.