Bio
Dr. Michelle Mohabeer is Guyana born and lives in Toronto/Canada, she is a multi award- winning filmmaker and academic. Mohabeer’s second creative feature documentary, Queer Coolie-tudes (2019) was recognized as “best female filmmaker 2020” by the Berlin Underground Film Festival, awarded, Direction Excellence from Docs Without Borders and won the “Intersect Award” from the 15th Caribbean Tales International Film Festival. Prior films include the feature essay documentary, Blu In You (2008), Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), and various shorts made between 1990-2003: Echoes (2003), Tracing Soul (2000), TWO/DOH (1996), EXPOSURE (1990) and the experimental narrative Child-Play (1996). Mohabeer’s films have showed worldwide at over 300 festivals, conferences, and galleries, and collected by over 60 University libraries across the U.S, Canada, and the Caribbean. Her films have been profiled or written about in Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors, The Romance of Transgression in Canada, North of Everything, The Bent Lens, Queering Canada: A Collection of Essays, and the article, “Putting the Cool in Coolie: Disidentification, Desire and Dissent in the work of filmmaker, Michelle Mohabeer” in The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, among others.
Michelle Mohabeer teaches at York University School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Future projects include a feature doc and a contributing editor of the critical anthology, Reframing the Nation: Racialized & Queer Diasporic Women of Colour and Indigenous Canadian Independent Women Filmmakers 1990-2020.