The Thomas Edison Media Arts Consortium in collaboration with the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University presents a film screening and panel discussion to honor Black History Month. Themes and Journeys of Artists and Filmmakers in New Jersey includes a premiere screening of three award-winning short films from the Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) collection produced, directed and/or performed by the five panelists: writer/director Seyi Peter-Thomas, poet Cortney Lamar Charleston, filmmaker and Princeton professor Moon Molson, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Yuri Alves, and artist Bimpé Fageyinbo, moderated by TEFF director Jane Steuerwald. The event on February 6 at 7:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street on the Princeton campus is free and open to the public.
The films to be screened are How Do you Raise a Black Child? by Peter-Thomas in collaboration with Charleston; The Bravest, the Boldest by Molson; and Freedom for Freedom by Alves featuring Fageyinbo.
The films are recent additions to the Thomas Edison Film Festival collection. TEFF is an international juried competition celebrating all genres and independent filmmakers across the globe. For more than 40 years, the festival has been advancing the unique creativity and power of the short film by celebrating stories that shine a light on issues and struggles within contemporary society. The festival was founded in 1981 as Black Maria Film Festival and originally named for Thomas Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, film studio dubbed the “Black Maria” because of its resemblance to the black-box police paddy wagons of the same name. Renamed in 2021, the festival’s relationship to Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is at the core of the festival.
The Lewis Center has partnered with TEFF since 2018 to host the annual premiere screening, scheduled this year for February 28 and March 1 on the Princeton campus and online to highlight award-winning films from the 2025 collection.
How Do You Raise a Black Child? is Peter-Thomas’ adaptation of Charleston’s poem of the same title that paints an important portrait of everyday life for a young Black man growing up in America. It is an impressionistic piece that explores the delicate balance parents must strike as they steer their children toward adulthood.

A still from Freedom for Freedom, by filmmaker Yuri Alves, featuring poet Bimpé Fageyinbo. Photo credit: Courtesy of Yuri Alves
In Molson’s The Bravest, the Boldest, two Army Casualty Notification Officers arrive at the Harlem projects to deliver Sayeeda Porter some news about her son serving in the war in the Middle East. Whatever it is they have to say, Sayeeda is trying not to hear it.
Freedom for Freedom by Alves presents Fageyinbo delivering a powerful ode to the memory and spirit of Harriet Tubman, while evoking the urgency of real freedom for Black people, then and now.
Themes and Journeys of Artists and Filmmakers in New Jersey is being produced and sponsored by Diane Moss, Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium trustee and DEAI chair, and counsel at Lowenstein Sandler, LLP. Moss has served as senior corporate counsel at Time Warner, counsel to the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, and board member of the Jonathan Levin Fund, The Orchid Foundation, and the Glass Roots Foundation.
Seyi Peter-Thomas is a writer/director directing award-winning commercial campaigns for Visa, Hilton, Honda, and McDonald’s. He began his career by directing some of MTV’s iconic on air-promos, and his PSA campaigns for MTV Safer Sex Initiative and Nickelodeon’s Black History Month have each garnered Daytime Emmys. Peter-Thomas’ poignant short film, How Do you Raise a Black Child? has the distinction of being preserved in MoMA’s permanent Film and Television archive. He is a graduate of the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the 2022 Director’s Guild of America TV Mentorship Program. He lives and works in New Jersey.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021); and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Moon Molson is an assistant professor of visual arts at Princeton. His short films Pop Foul, Crazy Beats Strong Every Time, and The Bravest, the Boldest, all premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His work has screened at over 250 international film festivals, and have since received more than 100 awards worldwide, including the Grand Jury Prizes at Palm Springs, South by Southwest (SXSW), and the Student Academy Awards. He has attended the 2008 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, the 2008 Film Independent (FIND) Directors Labs, the 2015 Warner Brothers Television Directors’ Workshop, and 2016 FOX Global Directors Initiative as a Fox Director Fellow. Molson was named a 2017 Pew Foundation Fellow, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video, and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in Summer 2007. He has received grants from The Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Sundance Institute.
Yuri Alves is an award-winning filmmaker born to Portuguese parents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Alves was raised in Newark, New Jersey, inside the Ironbound district, home to one of the largest Portuguese-speaking communities in the U.S. Alves directed two prime-time dramatic series, starring Diogo Morgado (The Bible), Tempo Final (2010), and Filha de Lei (2017), both to critical acclaim. He directed his first American series RZR, which was nominated for a prime-time Emmy in 2024, starring David Bianchi alongside a cast that includes Hollywood veterans Danny Trejo, BAFTA nominee Mena Suvari, and Emmy winner Richard Cabral. Alves’s short films have been screened at prestigious festivals such as Raindance, HBO NY Latino Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Thomas Edison Film Festival, Lincoln Center, and Tribeca Cinemas. He won his second Emmy in 2022 for Emerge, a live concert film airing on PBS and featuring the world-renowned New Jersey Symphony Orchestra led by Maestra Xian Zhang.
Bimpé Fageyinbo is a Nigerian artist—a poet, filmmaker, and photographer. Fageyinbo is the author of so maybe that’s the bee’s weakness (2010) and what was me (2017), the first two books of poetry in a continuing memoir series. Her recent collaborative work includes the A Womb of Violet Anthologies, archived in collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Library of Congress. In 2023, Fageyinbo was commissioned to write and perform her poem “Freedom for Freedom” at the historic Harriet Tubman Monument unveiling ceremony, hosted by Audible and the City of Newark, New Jersey. The poem was adapted into the Alves’ poetry film to be screened, produced by DreamPlay Media. The film was awarded the 2024 Jury’s Stellar Award at the 43rd Thomas Edison Film Festival. Fageyinbo is a 2024 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellow and is currently working on a third book of poetry.
The James Stewart Film Theater is an accessible venue. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at lewiscenter@princeton.edu
In addition to the support provided for the 2025 season by the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Thomas Edison Film Festival receives support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Charles Edison Fund–Edison Innovation Foundation; the Hudson County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs and Tourism; the Hoboken Historical Museum; Big Sky Edit; APM Music; Sonic Union; Lowenstein Sandler, LLP; the NBA; NJ Motion Picture and Television Commission; Rowan University; Fairleigh Dickinson University; and Digital Film East Brunswick Magnet School.
Visit the Thomas Edison Film Festival website to learn more about the Thomas Edison Film Festival and Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, which includes film studies and production, and the more than 100 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures offered each year at the Lewis Center, most of them free.