New York-based media activist, educator, and filmmaker Vee Bravo will deliver a lecture titled “’The Franchise’: Million Dollar Blocks and The Economy of Incarceration,” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 3 in 362 Willard Building on the University Park campus of Penn State.  The event is free and to the public.

Bravo is widely regarded for documenting youth culture, hip hop, and politics over the past two decades. During that time span, he co-founded “Stress Magazine,” the first national publication to fuse hip hop and politics, and has been instrumental in integrating music, film, and education programs into the New York State prison system. In addition to launching the Education Department of the Harlem-based Maysles Documentary Center, Bravo recently served as vice president - education at Tribeca Film Institute, where he launched an array of film screening and scriptwriting programs for more than 25,000 students in public schools and prisons.  Bravo also co-produced the PBS documentary “Estilo Hip Hop” and has served as a story consultant to George Lucas and Oprah Winfrey.

Bravo is currently producing “The Franchise,” an episodic documentary series that exposes the individuals behind the financial ecosystem feeding the prison pipeline that connects the South Bronx to rural upstate New York and everywhere in-between. His presentation includes a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the series.

Bravo’s lecture is the latest offering in the Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance Sawyer Seminar Series sponsored by the Penn State Department of African American Studies.  The seminar seeks to identify and examine ways that marginalized racial subjects in the Americas disrupt the logic of disposability creatively, politically, and intellectually using practices of organized resistance and an everyday politics of refusal. It is funded through a grant provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

To learn more, contact Cynthia Young, associate professor and head of the Department of African American Studies at cay9@psu.edu.