“One of Claire’s unique strengths is that she speaks for a community and to a community that most of New England doesn’t know much about… Andrade-Watkins has a gift for finding the right subjects to interview, people who are naturals in front of the camera, with interesting things to say. “I think that speaks to her relationship to this community….She’s not some stranger coming in with a camera.”

Carter Long, curator of film and video at the MFA

AndySmith, (June 10, 2016). Films illuminate R.I. Cape Verdean community.
Providence Journal

Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins, a 2nd generation Cape Verdean American, is an award-winning historian and filmmaker. She is a Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. She is a 1995 Fulbright Scholar, and her scholarship focuses on French- and Portuguese-speaking African cinema. She has published in the Society for Visual Anthropology, Research in African Literature, The Independent Film and Video Monthly, American Historical Review, and CinémAction.

In June 2016, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, presented a retrospective of her work, Our Rhode: 30 Years of Cinema By and About Cape Verdean Rhode Islanders. Her critically acclaimed first feature film, “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”: A Cape Verdean American Story was released in 2006, and her work has aired on WGBH-TV, WSBE TV, Rhode Island PBS, cable cast on P.E.G.-TV RI, and leading festivals of Africana Diaspora in the USA, Europe, and Africa. Competitive festival screenings for Serenata de Amor (2013), A Cape Verdean love story told in song include Oia! Festival, Sao Vicente, Cape Verde, 2015; Roxbury International Film Festival 2014, Official Selection, Athens International Film & Video Festival 2014, Showcase Selection, Lucerne International Film Festival, 2014 and Official Selection, Madrid International Film Festival, for Best Music in Film 2014.

“Hi, Neighbor” (Ola Vizinho) (USA, 13 min), an avant-garde/experimental short about a little girl’s memory of displacement, received the 2012 Black Maria Film Festival, Jury’s Choice(first prize).

Competitively funded grants include the LEF Foundation, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, RISCA(Rhode Island State Council on the Arts) Fellowship in Film & Video, for Working the Boats: Masters of the Craft, and Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship for “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”: A Cape Verdean American Story.