Kathe Sandler

Kathe Sandler is a Guggenheim Award winning documentary filmmaker. Her credits include A Question of Color (1993), the first nationally aired PBS documentary to explore attitudes about skin color, hair texture and facial features in African American communities, as well as Remembering Thelma (1982), on the late dancer, teacher and mentor Thelma Hill, which screened at the New York Film Festival. She later adapted and directed Rosa Guy’s classic Harlem novel The Friends (1995) as a short film which won awards from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. Sandler is a founding member of the Black Documentary Collective, where she worked closely with her mentor, the late St.Clair Bourne. She also served on the Artists’ Advisory Board for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Sandler completed her Ph.D. in January 2021 in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is currently adapting her dissertation entitled “How Black Feminism Takes Place: Intergenerational Activism and Cultural Production in the New Millennium” into a book. Sandler is also engaged in a similarly themed documentary film.