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About Pamela
Howard County

Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist and keynote speaker, intertwining her work as a writer, filmmaker, performer, and immersive-media director to create new forms of narrative work about Black women and girls and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of six Maryland State Arts Council Awards, five film-festival awards internationally, a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation, and two Baker Artist Awards in interdisciplinary arts. Her latest film, … more
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Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half
Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half is Pamela Woolford's marriage-memoir collection, a group of essays about her tumultuous relationship with her composer husband, who was emotionally abusive and showed signs of mental illness. Woolford was a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted for the 2017 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize for collection excerpts. Two excerpts from Meditations on a Marriage are published in Eunoia Review: "Coffee" and "Dog."
About Meditations on a Marriage, Pamela Woolford says, "Six months into my marriage to my composer (now ex-) husband, he, out of the blue, berated me for taking a break while writing an email he asked me to write as a favor. I was astonished and confused. Six months after that I had the thought that he might kill me. His escalating verbal assaults and mental abuse left me with that much fear. Yet even after he drove me out of our home on New Year's Day 2015 with two days of back-to-back rages, what I wanted more than anything was to have the man I fell in love with back. After little more than a year with him, I had become someone I didn't recognize. I was 46 when we married, and it was my first marriage partially because I am cautious, logical, and independent. How did this happen to me? Verbal and mental abuse are insidious in the way they slowly turn a person inside out, in my case making me question my own logic and intuition and long for the man who was actually abusing me. Meditations on a Marriage is about the love I shared with a fellow artist, my surprising but not atypical reaction to his abuse and manipulation, and his psychological challenges, as he exhibited signs of having a personality disorder."
About Meditations on a Marriage, Pamela Woolford says, "Six months into my marriage to my composer (now ex-) husband, he, out of the blue, berated me for taking a break while writing an email he asked me to write as a favor. I was astonished and confused. Six months after that I had the thought that he might kill me. His escalating verbal assaults and mental abuse left me with that much fear. Yet even after he drove me out of our home on New Year's Day 2015 with two days of back-to-back rages, what I wanted more than anything was to have the man I fell in love with back. After little more than a year with him, I had become someone I didn't recognize. I was 46 when we married, and it was my first marriage partially because I am cautious, logical, and independent. How did this happen to me? Verbal and mental abuse are insidious in the way they slowly turn a person inside out, in my case making me question my own logic and intuition and long for the man who was actually abusing me. Meditations on a Marriage is about the love I shared with a fellow artist, my surprising but not atypical reaction to his abuse and manipulation, and his psychological challenges, as he exhibited signs of having a personality disorder."
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Photo Art for Meditations on a MarriagePhoto art from Pamela Woolford's collection Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half. The photo, shot by Carolyn Greer, shows Woolford’s torso held in her ex-husband’s arms on the day of their wedding. She wears her late father’s watch, the blue-faced timepiece her something old, borrowed, and blue. Meditations on a Marriage made Woolford a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted her for the 2017 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize.To read two pieces from Meditations on a Marriage, click the links in the project description.
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No video provider was found to handle the given URL. See the documentation for more information.On The Margin Radio Interview & Podcast with Pamela WoolfordAuthor and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller interviewed Pamela Woolford on the WPFW 89.3 FM radio show and podcast On The Margin in October 2016 and discussed Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and Half. To listen, click the red arrow and then click to move forward to 30:40.
Performative Narrations (includes Antoine and Me)
Pamela Woolford performs live readings in character and voiceover work. Examples of each can be viewed by clicking the boxes shown, including a reading in character from her story "Just After Supper" and her voiceover work in an indie short.
Her project Antoine and Me, for which she performs voiceover in addition to being the writer, director, and model for the photographs, is the opening to a surreal love story contained in handmade photo albums and sound-designed photo narrations, or SDP narrations. The work premieres at the Baltimore Museum of Art "Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artist Awards" exhibition, running November 13, 2022-March 12 2023. Antoine and Me also marks the premiere of the world's first SDP narration Collectibles. A supply of 7 NFTs of the SDP narration for Photograph One of Antoine and Me was released at the WOCAX art show, Juneteenth weekend, 2022. For more information about the Antoine and Me project , visit https://pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me. For info about the related nfts, where you can actually hear an nft example of one of her SDP narrations, click the OpenSea NFT link at https://pamelawoolford.com/nft
In addition, Woolford is the primary onscreen talent, performing both acting and movement-based art, in her multi-award-winning film Generation (see separate Generation project description), the sole voice actor in Generation, the sole performer in her critically acclaimed film Interrupted (see separate Interrupted project description), and the sole voice actor in her virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted (see separate Up/Rooted project description.)
Trained in dance, theater, and voice performance, Pamela Woolford's performance career began in the early 1990s as a dancer and choreographer. In the early 2000s, she began performing voiceovers, including PSAs and for professional theater.
Her project Antoine and Me, for which she performs voiceover in addition to being the writer, director, and model for the photographs, is the opening to a surreal love story contained in handmade photo albums and sound-designed photo narrations, or SDP narrations. The work premieres at the Baltimore Museum of Art "Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artist Awards" exhibition, running November 13, 2022-March 12 2023. Antoine and Me also marks the premiere of the world's first SDP narration Collectibles. A supply of 7 NFTs of the SDP narration for Photograph One of Antoine and Me was released at the WOCAX art show, Juneteenth weekend, 2022. For more information about the Antoine and Me project , visit https://pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me. For info about the related nfts, where you can actually hear an nft example of one of her SDP narrations, click the OpenSea NFT link at https://pamelawoolford.com/nft
In addition, Woolford is the primary onscreen talent, performing both acting and movement-based art, in her multi-award-winning film Generation (see separate Generation project description), the sole voice actor in Generation, the sole performer in her critically acclaimed film Interrupted (see separate Interrupted project description), and the sole voice actor in her virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted (see separate Up/Rooted project description.)
Trained in dance, theater, and voice performance, Pamela Woolford's performance career began in the early 1990s as a dancer and choreographer. In the early 2000s, she began performing voiceovers, including PSAs and for professional theater.
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Antoine and MeAs a companion piece to the 2022 release of her virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows, which is a retrospective of her work, Pamela Woolford also premieres in 2022 her new project Antoine and Me, a surreal photo album set in an ambiguous time featuring performative photographs of Woolford with captions performed in character by Woolford through voiceovers which are sound designed. Antoine and Me is featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art 11/13/22-3/12/23. Visit www.pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me for more info. Antoine and Me is made possible in part with support from Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org.)
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Antoine and Me NFT CollectionThe Antoine and Me NFT collection is part of Pamela Woolford’s multimedia project of the same name in which she creates the artform of sound-designed photo (SDP) narrations. To hear and find out more, visit pamelawoolford.com/nft. The Antoine and Me project involves the marrying of age-old tactile artforms (contained in handmade photo albums) and new digital technology. Pamela Woolford is the writer, director, and primary voice actor in the Antoine and Me SDP narrations and models as the character in the albums. Sound design is by Gregory Robinson.
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Performative Reading from Just After SupperPamela Woolford doing one of her performative readings. Here she performs an excerpt from her true-life-inspired story "Just After Supper" for an online audience in 2020.
Pamela Woolford’s mother, writer Sadie Woolford is the inspiration for the character Mable in “Just After Supper,” which was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Woolford adapted the story to write the unique dual-narration script for her film Generation. To read the full story, click the link in the "Just After Supper" project description.
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The Sky Had VanishedThe Sky Had Vanished is a 2019 film by director Kevin Gilligan in which Pamela Woolford performs voiceover narration from 00:24-01:24 and again from 5:45-6:45.
Additional Fiction
In addition to the book Antoine and Me, described in the Up/Rooted project description above, and “Just After Supper,” published in Origins Journal and described in the Generation project description above, Pamela Woolford has written much more fiction and has been a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award winner for fiction, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. You can read her piece "Pleasant People" which has been republished with an introduction on Grace and Gravity. It was anthologized in Amazing Graces and was once published on Alfie Dog Fiction. To find out more about Woolford's fiction writing, click the various links on the right.
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Photo Art for SleepSleep is Pamela Woolford’s conceived novel-in-stories, a portrait of three interconnected people one fairly sleepless night, exploring each character's past, present, and future. Predominately set in two bedrooms, Sleep is also, more broadly, an exploration of the human spirit and connectivity found in ordinary lives. It takes place in an unnamed city, and certain characteristics of the protagonists go unlabeled, including age, race, and physical features. Sleep examines subtle meaning in actions between people as well as symbolism and suspense in the everyday. Lastly, it is an exploration of the relationship between longing and peace and a celebration of beauty in the quotidian.
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Photo Art for Pleasant People“Pleasant People” is a short story by Pamela Woolford, which explores facades of American society, walls between races, and a connection between two women stretching even beyond the grave. “Pleasant People” appeared in the anthology Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody and was published in Alfie Dog Fiction. It was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. The story has been republished on Grace and Gravity and can be read by clicking the link in the project description.
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Opening Lines of Threshold“Threshold” is the first story in Woolford’s conceived novel-in-stories Taking One’s Life. The novel's title is a reference to both suicide and considering one’s life. “Threshold" made Woolford a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts and also won her admittance to a weeklong workshop sponsored by Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and led by then PEN/Faulkner Foundation president Richard McCann. It was her time in the McCann workshop which led Woolford to write her collection Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half.
Speeches, Presentations, and Interview Writing
Pamela Woolford is a speaker and keynote storyteller amplifing the histories, memories, joys, and inner lives of Black women and girls and others whose voices are under-explored in American media, popular art, and experimental spaces. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, she has been the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University; delivered a keynote address for a TogetHER Women's Forum session sponsored by United Way of Central Maryand; curated and headlined the program Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness, which was attended virtually by 1.5 thousand people; presented memoir-in-verse for Artists U SHIFT; and performed a dramatic reading for the Baker Artist Awards showcase. For more information about Woolford's work as a speaker and presenter/performer, including clips from her presentations, visit: pamelawoolford.com/speaker.
Pamela Woolford has conducted interviews and profiles with noted figures in arts, culture, scholarship, and science since the early 1990s for Poets & Writers Magazine, the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University's Transition, and other publications, including her widely cited interview with filmmaker Haile Gerima "Filming Slavery," which appeared in Issue #64 of Transition.
Pamela Woolford has conducted interviews and profiles with noted figures in arts, culture, scholarship, and science since the early 1990s for Poets & Writers Magazine, the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University's Transition, and other publications, including her widely cited interview with filmmaker Haile Gerima "Filming Slavery," which appeared in Issue #64 of Transition.
Woolford's interview work has been cited in, for example, books such as:
- Commander, Michelle D. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
- Falola,Toyin and Augustine Agwuele, eds. Africans and the Politics of Popular Culture Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009
- Field, Allyson Nadia and Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds. L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
- Henry, DeWitt, ed. Breaking into Print: Early Stories and Insights into Getting Published, A Ploughshares Anthology Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
- Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Keeling, Kara. The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
- Lupton, Mary Jane and Lucille Clifton. Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters Westport: Praeger, 2006.
- Ndounou, Monica White Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.
- Peterson, James Braxton, ed. In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-first Century Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014.
- Young, Cynthia A. Soul Power: Culture Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
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Pamela Woolford, Changemaker Challenge Winner, on Columbia's Black Freedom VisionariesPamela Woolford received a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation for her upcoming project Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries. She wrote, sound designed, and performed this 5-minute speech about the initial concept for the project and delivered the presentation at this Changemaker Challenge event at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Since then, Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries has grown into a larger multimedia project. The music is "Zoot Suit" by Okorie "OkCello" Johnson. (Please note Woolford did not have control over the sound levels during the presentation.)
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2019 Blackbottom Film Festival at August Wilson CenterPamela Woolford presenting at the 2019 Black Bottom Film Festival at August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. Her film "Generation" was one of 20 films chosen for that year's festival, alongside that year's Academy Award nominated films If Beale Street Could Talk and Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie.
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"Filming Slavery"One of Pamela Woolford's early interviews, her 1994 piece "Filming Slavery," had been required reading at universities over decades and is cited in books and scholarly works. "Filming Slavery" appears in Issue #64 of Transition and can be accessed through the link in the project description.
Threshold
“Threshold” is the first story in Pamela Woolford’s novel-in-stories Taking One’s Life, which she began writing while married to her emotionally abusive husband, who was suicidal. The title Taking One’s Life is a reference to both suicide and considering one’s life. “Threshold” made Woolford a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. “Threshold” also won Woolford admittance to the weeklong writing workshop Life Stories, Real and Imagined, sponosored by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and led by author and PEN/Faulkner Foundation president Richard McCann. Woolford’s current book project, Meditations on A Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half, grew out of the McCann workshop. “Threshold” is currently available for publication.
Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir
Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, a memoir short about anti-Blackness in America, is Pamela Woolford's latest film release in which she is the writer, director, editor, and sole performer. Originally scheduled to premiere at a 2020 solo show of her work at Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, the film has had a limited on-demand run (after the postponing of her gallery show to 2022 due to to the pandemic). In collaboration with Busboys and Poets and the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, Woolford hosted an online film-premiere event, Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness, which was attended by 1.5 thousand people. The film also screened through Marymount University later that year and was the subject of Woolford's 2020 Bisson Lecture in the Humanities there. For more information about Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir, please visit mem-noir.com.
Interrupted will screen as part of the virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. For more information , visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.
Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir was made possible in part thanks to the support of Maryland State Arts Council, United Way of Central Maryland, Mosaic Center for Culture and Diversity at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Leah Mazur and Drew Willard, Bob James, and Resonance Records.
Interrupted will screen as part of the virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. For more information , visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.
Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir was made possible in part thanks to the support of Maryland State Arts Council, United Way of Central Maryland, Mosaic Center for Culture and Diversity at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Leah Mazur and Drew Willard, Bob James, and Resonance Records.
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Trailer for Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noirThe trailer for Pamela Woolford's critically-acclaimed experimental short Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir, which is screened in the VR experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. Woolford wrote, directed, edited, and was the sole performer for the film, which had a limited online release in 2020 and a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people. For more information about Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, visit www.pamelawoolford.com/interrupted or see the project description.
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Art as a Response to Anti-BlacknessArt as a Response to Anti-Blackness was the virtual film-launch event for Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir attended by more than 1.5 thousand people. It was a dynamic conversation inspired by the film with panelists jazz-great Bob James, two-time NAACP Image Award-nominated author Marita Golden, and Joseph Lewis, founder of Black Bottom Film Festival and executive director of Jazz Bridge. Lindsey Yancich of Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery spoke about Pamela Woolford's work, and Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets and Dr. Charles Chavis of George Mason University cohosted.
Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir)
Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir) is an upcoming Pamela Woolford memoir with drawings by nationally syndicated Black-American editorial cartoonist Walt Carr. With the tagline "A Black woman’s memory of her childhood confidence and the racist tide she swam against in suburban 1970s America," Disrupt/ed is a race-based childhood memoir in vignettes. In the book Pamela Woolford explores her early childhood in the 1970s in the planned integrated town of Columbia, Maryland, amidst this nation's legacy of enslavement of Black people, like her.
With the creation of Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir), Pamela Woolford originates the term "mem-noir."
mem-noir: [mem-nwär] NOUN, A memoir, written in short paragraphs or verse, concerned with being a person of the Black race within the context of a specified subject, time period, or circumstance. Visual art or photographs, especially biographical in nature, are often incorporated.
Disrupt/ed is supported in part by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. For more information about Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir), visit pamelawoolford.com/disrupted.
Artist Statement for Meditations on a Marriage
This is a video artist statement for Pamela Woolford's work-in-progress Meditations on a Marriage, a multidiscipline memoir. Meditations on a Marriage will be a book (represented by the Carol Mann Agency) with an accompanying short film, a film about a dance about a book about emotional abuse. The book will be a collection of first-person vignettes on Woolford's verbally and mentally abusive interracial relationship with her composer husband, who showed signs of mental illness. Woolford was a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and longlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize for excerpts from the project.
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Artist Statement for Meditations on a MarriageThis is a video artist statement for Meditations on a Marriage, Pamela Woolford's marriage-memoir collection, a group of essays about Woolford’s tumultuous relationship with her composer husband, who was emotionally abusive and showed signs of mental illness. Woolford was a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted for the 2017 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize for collection excerpts. (Video writing, direction, sound design, and voice-over by Pamela Woolford. Cinematography by Denee Barr. Color edits by David Hester. Sound edits by Tokyo Cigar.)