Morgan Grain

Morgan was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and graduated cum laude from Florida A&M University before moving to New York City. After holding internships in print media at Essence and InStyle, she came to Gallatin with the goal of diversifying her media skill set by exploring film and television production and digital content creation while learning about race and media politics. Morgan has been able to successfully build her writing skills in classes like Professor Lara Vapnar’s Writing Fiction in the Digital Age and Professor Christopher Bram’s Storytelling: Writing Techniques for Fiction and Nonfiction. She has learned about the trends and historical impact of a white supremacist and patriarchal society on the development of African-American women in classes like Awam Ampka’s Proseminar to Africana Studies in CAS and, in the NYU History Department, Professor Michael Gomez’s Black Internationalisms. In the summer of 2015, she participated in Producing in London, a special program through NYU Tisch.

Morgan’s MA thesis will focus on producing alternative images of black women that combat stereotypes typically founding mainstream media, particularly in film, television, and digital media. She wants to create spaces that provide alternative narratives and platforms for women of color to voice their experiences and relate to images representative of their lifestyle. She has begun to realize this through her studies, her website Unapologetic Media, and through her volunteer work for the organization Truth in Reality.