Michele Forman

Michele Forman is a documentary filmmaker and Director of Media Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an interdisciplinary minor she co-founded in 2003.  The aim of the program is to educate college students in media production practice and film history, as well as connect them with crucial community issues in the Greater Birmingham area through documentary filmmaking, digital storytelling, and multimedia-based research. 

Forman gained her experience as an executive in feature films.  As Director of Development at Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, she was responsible for the acquisition and development of new projects, including New Jersey Drive, Girl 6, Sula, The Jackie Robinson Story, and Summer of Sam.  In addition, Forman served as associate producer on Mr. Lee's Academy Award-nominated film 4 Little Girls, a feature-length documentary for HBO about the bombing of the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

Her work with the UAB Media Studies Program has created a student-produced archive of over 300 community-based social justice short films.  The films are available free of charge online, streaming from both the UAB Mervyn H. Sterne Digital Collection and the UAB Media Studies Vimeo Channel.  Program partnerships include Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, McWane Science Center, UAB School of Public Health, Sidewalk Film Festival, Vulcan Park and Museum, Red Mountain Park, WBHM, and the national oral history project, StoryCorps.  Media Studies has been supported in part by the Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues Initiative, of which Forman served as a Principal investigator.

Since 1997, Forman has been directing and producing documentary projects for film and television, earning an Emmy nomination in 2001 for Coat of Many Colors.  Her feature-length documentary Climb for the Cause: A Breast Cancer Story (2007) documents five women who became activists for women’s health after surviving breast cancer.  The film sent Forman up Mt. Kilimanjaro, one of the world’s tallest peaks, following the women as they raised money and awareness about what women can accomplish after cancer.  Climb for the Cause was optioned for fictional adaptation by Caribou Entertainment.

Her current film is slated to tell the stories of lesbian families in Alabama after the ground-breaking Supreme Court decisions about same-sex marriage.

Forman began her film work at Harvard University, where she double-majored in English and filmmaking.  She consults on media pedagogy in higher education and media strategies for a number of non-profit organizations.