Africana Distinguished Lecture-Speaker Series presents Kwakiutl L. Dreher!

As part of a series of events celebrating Women’s History Month, the Africana Studies Program at Lehigh University welcomes Kwakiutl L. Dreher for a presentation of a feature length film The Bell Affair, a project in collaboration with animating artist Michael Burton and historian Wiliam G. Thomas, III. Based on Thomas’s research from his book A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War, Dreher will screen The Bell Affair and facilitate Q&A thereafter.

About the film: Daniel and Mary Bell sued for their freedom from slavery and won. After slaveholders threaten to re-enslave them and their children, the Bells led one of the largest escape attempts in American history. Their inspiring story is brought to cinema for the first time.

Kwakiutl L. Dreher is a screenwriter, actor, director, playwright, and author. A native of South Carolina, she writes about African American literature, film, visual, and popular culture. She is the author of Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography (SUNY Press) and numerous articles and essays. She directed, co-wrote, and -produced The Bell Affair (2022), a feature-length film based on the true story of Daniel and Mary Bell, an enslaved family who initiated the largest escape to freedom in the history of the nation. Dreher wrote and acted in Anna (2018). She has also played Mamie Till in Anne & Emmett, Mrs. Harriet Gottlieb in Dead Man's Cellphone, and Louise in the film The Eyes of Isabelle. Her one-woman show, In A Smoke-Filled Room, Color Matters, was a playlab selection at the Great Plains Theater Festival in 2013 after its theatrical debut at The Haymarket Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska. A storyteller at heart, she has written and recorded stories for public radio. Dreher is currently at work on a murder mystery set in her hometown, Columbia, South Carolina. She is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Nebraska.

Presented by the Africana Studies Program and the English Department