325 DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER RORY KENNEDY DELIVERS LECTURE APRIL 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 25, 2007CONTACT: College of Liberal Arts, 615-494-7628

DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER RORY KENNEDY DELIVERS 16TH ANNIVERSARY WINDHAM LECTURE AT MTSU ON APRIL 5
Windham Lecture, Related Film Screenings Free & Open to Public

(MURFREESBORO)—Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, co-founder and co-president of Moxie Firecracker Films Inc., will help MTSU‘s Windham Lecture Series celebrate its 16th anniversary by delivering this year's lecture at 5 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in the State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building. In preparation for her visit, two of Kennedy's films, American Hollow and A Boy's Life, also will be shown from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily Tuesday through Thursday, March 27-29, in the Keathley University Center Theater on campus The screenings are free and open to the public.
Kennedy, one of the nation's most prolific independent documentary filmmakers, will speak on “The Camera Doesn’t Lie” during her appearance at MTSU. Her work has tackled some of our most pressing social concerns in her work, including poverty, domestic abuse, drug addiction, human rights, AIDS and mental illness, and have garnered numerous awards and been featured on HBO, A&E, MTV, Lifetime, The Oxygen Network, Court TV, TLC and PBS. Her most recent film, The Ghost of Abu Ghraib, recently premiered on HBO. Through her films, Kennedy aims to illuminate larger social issues by telling the stories of everyday people. Kennedy's film American Hollow, an award-winning documentary about an Appalachian family caught between century-old tradition and the encroaching modern world, premiered to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast as part of HBO's America Undercover series and received a Non-Fiction Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Kennedy directed and produced A Boy's Life, a heartbreaking and dramatic portrait of the troubling forces that have shaped the life of a seven-year-old boy from an impoverished region of Mississippi, touching on drug abuse, family dysfunction and religion. She also directed and produced Pandemic: Facing AIDS, which follows the lives of five people living with AIDS and which ultimately connects audiences with the heartache and triumph of living under the extreme conditions of the disease. Her other films include Epidemic Africa, Fire in Our House, Juvies, The Changing Face of Beauty, Travelers, Different Moms, Healthy Start, The Nazi Officer's Wife, Sixteen and Girlhood. Kennedy is a committed social activist and human rights advocate. She has been a member of the board of directors for a number of nonprofit organizations, including the Legal Action Center and the Project Return Foundation. She served as chairwoman of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation Associate Trustees Program and continues as a member of the board. She was a member of the 1999 Presidential Mission on AIDS in Africa. Kennedy initiated and helped develop the Teacher Transfer Program between the U.S. and Namibia after her work at the Dobra Resettlement Camp. She has also been a member of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights delegations in South Africa, South Korea, Japan, El Salvador and Poland, and she is a graduate of Brown University with a bachelor of arts degree in women's studies.

About the Windham Lecture Series

The Windham Lecture Series in Liberal Arts was established by William and Westy Windham through the MTSU Foundation. Dr. William Windham was a member of the MTSU faculty from 1955 to 1989 and served as chairman of the Department of History the last 11 years. Westy Windham (1927-1991) earned a master's degree in sociology at MTSU and was the founder of Great American Singalong.
The inaugural Windham Lecture in 1990 featured Drs. Dan T. Carter of Emory University and Dewey W. Grantham of Vanderbilt University, who spoke on “The South and the Second Reconstruction.” Since then, the Windham Lectures have addressed topics spanning from American music to presidential rhetoric to gambling to U.S. foreign policy, to name a few.
The Windham series is sponsored annually by the College of Liberal Arts, with the assistance of the assorted departments within the college.
• For more information, please contact the College of Liberal Arts at MTSU at 615-494-7628.



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ATTENTION, MEDIA—To secure a jpeg of Rory Kennedy for editorial use, please e-mail your request to Lisa L. Rollins in the Office of News and Public Affairs at MTSU at lrollins@mtsu.edu or call 615-898-2919.