SPIA Media Productions

SPIA's mission is the documentation, preservation and dissemination of Cape Verdean-American and Cape Verdean history, culture, and traditions through films, videos, and multi-platform productions that explore the multiplicity of voices, images and stories that are rarely seen or heard. Dr. Andrade-Watkins is currently at work on a documentary feature trilogy about the Fox Point Cape Verdean community: the first, released in 2006, Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?: A Cape Verdean American Story, is about the Cape Verdean community in the Fox Point section of Providence, RI that was forcibly displaced by the urban renewal and gentrification. Principal photography for the second and third features, Atlantic Portal, about the community in the aftermath of displacement And Working the Boats, about the predominantly Cape Verdean Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen's Association was completed between 2007 and 2009. Other documentaries include: Building a Legacy, (2006) a short documentary on a pioneering Cape Verdean businessman; Cape Verde Independence July 5 and 6, 1975, (2005) a powerful short documentary from archival footage on the actual moment of independence in Cape Verde; and The Spirit of Cape Verde, (1986) a half-hour documentary celebrating the bonds between New England, Cape Verde and President Aristides Pereira's historical first visit to the United States in 1983. Dr. Andrade-Watkins was an Associate Producer on Odyssey, a National PBS anthropology and archaeology documentary series, and Assistant to the Producer on Sankofa, an internationally acclaimed feature film on slavery by filmmaker Haile Gerima. Dr. Andrade-Watkins is an Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts, at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and a 2009-2010 Visiting Scholar at Brown University in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University and a 2009 Swearer Community Fellow.