Jamal Joseph -- From Black Panther and Convict to Professor, Oscar Nominee, and Youth Advocate

Eddie Joseph was a fifteen-year-old Bronx honor student when he joined the Black Panthers in 1968. When Joseph went to his first Panther meeting, bursting with militant enthusiasm and expecting to be issued a gun, the leader handed him a stack of books: Mao, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver. At sixteen, by then called Jamal, he was in prison with the legendary Panther 21 and would later serve more years at Leavenworth, where he earned two college degrees and found a new calling in prison theater. Now a film professor at Columbia University and former chair of their Graduate Film Program, as well as a recent Oscar nominee, he tells the remarkable story of his transformation in Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention. He is the executive artistic director of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem and cofounder and executive artistic director of IMPACT Repertory Theater, which has mentored over one thousand Harlem teens, providing an artistic voice for their lives and a constructive channel for social activism. “I began to see the power of art to bring people together to tell their stories, and to heal the human spirit,” he says.