The executive director of Third World Newsreel from 1988 to 1998, Ada Gay Griffin directed the award-winning documentary film, A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde with Michelle Parkerson for Third World Newsreel. The full-length documentary film was released in 1995 with exclusive interviews of the warrior poet, and her contemporaries, revealing one of the most powerful voices for the inclusion of LGBT liberation in the self-determination goals of Africa’s diaspora.

Writer, filmmaker and educator Michelle Parkerson is from Washington, DC. Her creative career gained impetus in the late 1970s and early 80s, when she became a major contributor to a new Black gay and lesbian renaissance of artists, musicians, activists, writers and dramatists in the city – among them, her close friend, poet Essex Hemphill.