Joan Mandell

Introduction (2-3 lines)

Joan Mandell is a Detroit-based journalist, oral historian and documentary filmmaker.

Joan is currently working on Wild Detroit Honey, a feature-length documentary about her city and its pollinators of both the insect and homo sapien varieties.

Joan recently directed two documentary segments for the Emmy award-winning PBS series, Arab American Stories. And she is proud of her ground-breaking work producing and curating Patriots and Peacemakers, a multimedia oral history based exhibit for the Arab American National Museum. The exhibit, featuring audio and video interviews with more than 100 veterans of the military, Peace Corps and diplomatic corps, travelled to museums and university galleries nationwide.

Joan Mandell currently divides her time between Washington DC, where she teaches at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and Detroit, where she is a beekeeper and educator at Green Toe Gardens. She has also taught at the University of California/ Irvine, College for Creative Studies/Detroit, Birzeit University/Palestine and aboard a ship travelling around the world with Semester-at-Sea. She co-founded Al Fajr news-weekly, served for two decades on the editorial board of Middle East Report and was a Fulbright scholar.

New Day Films by Joan Mandell

Awards & Accolades

Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Video Festival – Award for Excellence
Chicago Children's International Film Festival – Liv Ullmann Peace Prize
Festival dei Popoli (Italy) – Golden Lion (Grand Prize)
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