Biography

Pearl Bowser (née Johnson; June 25, 1931 – September 14, 2023) was an American author, collector, television director, film scholar, film director, producer, filmmaker, independent distributor and film archivist. Along with her peers Mel Roman and Charles Hobson, Bowser researched and curated "The Black Film" retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1970. This prompted a new wave of public interest into "exhibiting, producing, and engaging with African American cinema beyond borders". Most of her exalted career was spent traveling the globe in order to cultivate audiences for marginalized filmmakers. An example of her efforts, and also her most groundbreaking work, manifested in her research on "early-1900s Black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux". This research can be seen in her book on the first ten years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She is thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She is the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey included teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s.

Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers.

In 2012, Bowser gifted her library of films to the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American Media Arts. Some of the works in her collection include Hands of Image directed by John W. Fletcher, Statutes Hardly Smile directed by Stan Lathan, and Four Women directed by Julie Dash. These are maintained by Earl W. and Amanda Stafford and can be found at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.