*AT CAPACITY* Film Screening: Still Searching with director Latoya Flowers, artist Damon Reed, Dr. Terrion Williamson, & Scheherazade Tillet

*Registration is closed for this event, as we have reached capacity*

Join the UIC Social Justice Initiative for a special editor’s cut of Still Searching, a forthcoming documentary film by the Field Museum's Latoya Flowers-Rudd, on artist Damon Lamar Reed's portrait series of Chicago’s missing Black women and girls. The film explores how an artistic practice that began in lockdown in 2020 catalyzed a wave of memory activism, connecting families of missing loved ones, organizers, artists, and more to advocate for justice.

After this unique opportunity to see this urgent film in progress, SJI is honored to host a panel discussion with Latoya Flowers-Rudd (filmmaker and the Field Museum's Senior Multimedia Creative), Damon Lamar Reed (artist), Scheherazade Tillet (director of A Long Walk Home, artist, and curator), and Dr. Terrion Williamson (UIC professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women's Studies). This discussion brings together leading voices in Black feminist thought, visual storytelling, and activism, and is not to be missed.

RSVP at go.uic.edu/StillSearching

Thank you to our co-sponsors: A Long Walk Home, UIC Black Studies, and the Black Midwest Initiative.

Meet the panelists:

Latoya Flowers-Rudd is a multimedia creative and filmmaker with over a decade of experience shaping how audiences engage with stories inside museum spaces. She currently serves as Senior Multimedia Creative at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she works closely in exhibition development. Alongside her museum work, Latoya is directing Still Searching, a short documentary supported by the Hulu/Kartemquin Films Accelerator Program, Sisters in Cinema Documentary Fellowship, and the Chicago Digital Media Production Fund. Her practice bridges creative media production and cultural storytelling, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and engaging for diverse audiences.

Damon Lamar Reed is an artist whose portrait series is featured in this film. After graduating from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this Choose Chicago and Chicago Public Art Group Artist of the Year began his career as an Artist and entrepreneur.  To date, he has created over 400 murals including projects for Showtime, Gatorade, The American Red Cross, Ticketmaster, Sears, and more. His work is highlighted in Kym Pinders’, Painting the Gospel. Revolt TV named Damon “Revolutionary of the Week” citing the impact of his Still Searching project, where he uses art to raise awareness about missing women. The BBC also did a feature on the impact of Damon’s art; not to mention stories on News Nation, ABC, CBS, WGN and NBC. Damon is a true believer in the POWER of art and he uses it as a catalyst to change the world!

Dr. Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC, where she also serves as the founding director of the Black Midwest Initiative. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (2017) and the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (2020). Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, her research attends broadly to working-class black life in the deindustrializing Midwest, with a particular emphasis on black women’s experiences of interpersonal harm and gender violence. Currently, she is working on a book about the deaths of nine black women who were killed in her hometown between 2003 and 2004.

Professor Williamson earned a B.A. from UIC, a J.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her work has been supported by a range of funders, including the Ford Foundation, Humanities Without Walls, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.

Scheherazade Tillet is a nationally recognized photographer, curator, and feminist activist whose work sits at the intersection of art, memory, and social justice. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national arts organization that uses art to empower young people to end violence against women and girls. Rooted in art therapy and documentary photography, Tillet’s artistic practice explores grief, care, play, and resistance across the African Diaspora. Her work positions art as a public and political tool, one that insists on remembrance, ritual, and collective healing. This commitment is powerfully expressed in The Black Girlhood Altar, a traveling sacred public art installation exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, memorializing missing and murdered Black girls while creating space for communal mourning and reflection.