Beverly Seckinger

Beverly Seckinger is Distinguished Outreach Professor in the School of Theatre, Film & Television at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the faculty in 1991, she worked as a freelance producer in Philadelphia, and spent four years in Morocco, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and later as a literacy researcher. In 1993-94 she served as a USAID-Women in Development consultant in Tunisia.

Seckinger's diary/documentary Laramie Inside Out, an exploration of the ongoing reverberations in her hometown community of Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder, had its U.S. broadcast premiere on PBS in June 2007. It has been screened at dozens of universities, conferences and community events across the country, and purchased by nearly 400 colleges and universities.

Her film Hippie Family Values, a feature-length documentary about three generations at a back-to-the-land community in rural New Mexico, won the Grand Festival Award for Documentary at the Berkeley Film Festival, the Outstanding Project Award for 2019 from the Communal Studies Association, and the Outstanding Documentary Award from the University Film & Video Association.

Working with a diverse team of collaborators, her current project profiles four Chicana feminist activists in Southern Arizona, whose collective work over the past 50 years has shaped academic research in Border and Chicanx Studies and influenced human rights movements and policy in the Southwest and internationally.

Seckinger is the founding director of the Lesbian Looks Film Series and the DocScapes Film and Workshop Series. In 2017 she created DocVisions, a community outreach program that teaches documentary skills to college students from diverse majors, who make short films on refugee and immigration topics in Tucson and mentor English language learning teens in media production. She teaches "Advancing Human Rights through Documentary Media" in the Human Rights Practice online graduate program.