Conversations w/ Professor June Cross

Associate Professor - Columbia School of Journalism
June Cross is an award-winning producer and writer with overthirty years of television news and documentary experience.   She is currently in pre-production on a film about HIV in rural America, and researching a story in Pakistan.  Her latest documentary, "The Old Man and the Storm," followed the travails of an extended New Orleans family for three years post-Katrina, aired on PBS' "Frontline" in early 2009.

She was an executive producer for "This Far by Faith," a six-part PBS series on the African-American religious experience that broadcast in 2003.  During her thrity-five year career, she completed eight documentaries PBS’s "Frontline.”  CBS News, and PBS’s "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." Her reporting for the "NewsHour" on the US invasion of Grenada won the 1983 Emmy for Outstanding Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story. "Secret Daughter," an autobiographical film that examined how race and color had affected her family, won an Emmy in 1997 and was honored that same year with a duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. She is also the author of a memoir, "Secret Daughter" published by Viking in 2006.

Cross has covered the defense industry, the Middle East, and the intersection of poverty, politics, and race in the US and in Haiti. She received her B.A. from Harvard, and was a fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University's School of Urban and Public Affairs and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Studies at Harvard.

TITLE: "Public Health, HIV, and the realities facing rural African-Americans"

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