“Summer of Soul” Screening & Talkback
Join us for a private virtual screening of Summer of Soul, the powerful and transporting Oscar-nominated documentary — part music film, part historical record created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten — until now. Summer of Soul shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past and present.
The private screening will be followed by a talkback with producer Robert Fyvolent, executive producer Beth Hubbard ’85, cast member and festival attendee Musa Johnson, and Grammy Award-winning music producer Patrick Douthit, better known as 9th Wonder. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies.
Panel
Patrick Douthit, aka 9th Wonder
Music Executive and Producer, DJ, Activist
Adjunct Professor at Duke University
Patrick Douthit, aka 9th Wonder, is a super producer, CEO, DJ, and lecturer from Winston-Salem, NC. He began his career as the main producer for the group Little Brother, and has also worked with Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Destiny’s Child, Mary J Blige, Jean Grae, Wale, Murs, Drake, Buckshot, Chris Brown, Rapsody, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Big Boi of Outkast, Ludacris, Mac Miller, and David Banner to name a few.
9th Wonder entered the world academia in 2007 at North Carolina Central University, where he currently is Artist of Residence, lecturing a class titled HipHop History. His role as a music professor continued to expand where in 2010 it was announced that he would co-teach a class titled “Sampling Soul” with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal at Duke University. He served at Harvard University under the Nasir Jones Fellowship where he lectured and researched the Hip Hop Archive in the W.E.B. Dubois Institute, under the direction of Dr. Marcy Morgan and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 9th Wonder has also worked on a research project in conjunction with the Loeb Library at Harvard University, chronicling the top 200 Hip-Hop Albums of all time. He has also served as Artist of Residence at The University Of Pennsylvania and The University of Virginia, while also guest lecturing at several other institutions. In May 2021, Douthit joined the Faculty at Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at Long Island University as a visiting professor.
In 2010, 9th Wonder started his independent label Jamla Records in Raleigh, NC, which fostered the career of rising star “Rapsody,” an emcee hailing from Snow Hill NC, who after numerous mixtapes landed her first breakthrough on Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly,” also earning him a Grammy Nomination for sound engineering on the album. In that same year, 9th Wonder was selected to join the Executive Committee for Hip-Hop and Rap at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where he has an exhibit on the Musical Crossroads floor. In 2017, 9th Wonder produced the song “Duckworth” on “Damn,” the 4th studio album of Compton MC, Kendrick Lamar. In October of 2019, 9th Wonder was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.
9th Wonder continues to produce, teach, inspire, and push the culture of hip-hop forward in the community, industry and the world of academia.
Robert Fyvolent
Attorney, Screenwriter & Film Producer
Robert Fyvolent has spent over 30 years working as an attorney at and for major motion picture studios and leading independent production companies. As an attorney at Disney and Sony Screen Gems, and Head of Business and Legal Affairs for Newmarket Films, he’s helped build a library of over 250 films including Memento, Donnie Darko, The Passion of The Christ, Whale Rider, Monster, The Prestige and Boondock Saints. He also practiced as solo entertainment law practitioner with a broad range of entertainment industry clients, including Pantelion Entertainment and Globalgate Entertainment and involved in all aspects of film and television production, acquisition, financing and distribution as well as the representation of writers, producers and talent. His recent production legal work included Trumbo, Cake, Mr. Church, and Cries from Syria.
After years on the legal side of cinema, he has now pivoted to the world of making films come to life. He is known for his work as a screenwriter for Untraceable, executive producer of Francesco (2020) and most recently producer of Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
Fvyolent graduated from Tulane University, attended Loyola Law School and received a J.D. from South Texas College of Law. Fyvolent also completed New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Intensive Film Workshop and is a regular attendee at global film markets and a frequent speaker at industry forums including the Rio Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival.
Beth Hubbard ’85
Film and Television Producer
Beth Hubbard ’85 is a film and television producer and a philanthropist. She began her film career at The Mount Company; a production company with overall production deals at Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers. She played a vital role as part of the production team for Oscar nominated Bull Durham starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins (Orion) and worked closely with writer/director Ron Shelton. She continued her work in production back in Los Angeles on Tequila Sunrise starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Mel Gibson (WB). From the production side, she shifted to the development team becoming Vice President of Feature Film Development at The Mount Company.
In 1993, Hubbard left The Mount Company to form her own independent production company, Bright Idea Entertainment where she set up studio projects including RITUAL, based on the NAACP award winning play starring Clarence Williams III and Denise Nicholas. In television, Hubbard served as Executive Producer for the animated science-based series The Zula Patrol and Almost Famous starring Alicia Keys, Anthony Anderson, and Michael Strahan.
After leaving Bright Idea Entertainment, in 2017, Hubbard independently produced the critically acclaimed documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor, which won the Human Rights Award at the Venice Film Festival. Then in 2020, Hubbard served as Executive Producer on Nine Days starring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz and Bill Skarsgard which premiered at The Sundance Film Festival. In 2021, Hubbard Executive Produced the music documentary Summer of Soul. Her most recent work is as the producer of Citizen Ashe, a documentary based on the life of Arthur Ashe.
One of Hubbard’s personal passions is philanthropy. She is Chairman of the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation, a foundation that supports service in the area of social justice and the arts in the state of North Carolina.
Musa Jackson
Screenwriter, Film Producer & “The Harlem Ambassador”
Musa Jackson was born and raised in Harlem. A successful groundbreaking model, he was discovered by a GQ editor in 1983. He has worked for GQ, Vogue Hommes & New York Fashion Of the Times. He walked the Paris & Milan runways for Jean Paul Gaultier and has been featured in campaigns for Marithe & Girbaud, and Coty fragrance.
Musa has been photographed by iconic lensmen of our times: Mario Testino, Fabrizio Ferri, Albert Watson, Patrick Demarchelier. He starred in over 30 national commercials and was the first Black male model for The Gap in a national campaign from his beloved Harlem.
An accomplished screenwriter and producer, he sold his first screenplay to Disney’s Hollywood Pictures and is a winner of the American Gem Short Screenplay Award. He was a producer for New York Fashion Week and produced events for many of Harlem’s prominent businesses. He produced Lena Horne at 100 and Nona Hendryx’s 1st solo visual art show.
He collaborated on events at The Apollo, Schomburg Center and Dance Theater Of Harlem. His Harlem events have been featured in The Daily News, The NY Post, on NBC and The BBC. He’s produced photo shoots for Spirit & Flesh, Japanese Pen, and AFROSTYLE magazines.
He has served on the boards of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance and the Community Advisory Board Of Harlem Children’s Zone. He received Bank of America Local Hero Award, Women in Black Honoree and was Hennessy Black Harlem 100 Honoree. After decades of representing his beloved community, Uptown magazine, gave him the official moniker of “The Harlem Ambassador.”
Dr. Mark Anthony Neal
James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University
Dr. Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University where he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy Award Winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).
He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally Neal host of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke.