Kendall Moore, PhD

Kendall Moore, PhD, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a Full Professor in the departments of Journalism and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining the faculty at URI in 2003, she worked as a television journalist focusing on medical, health, race, and environmental issues. 

 

Moore has produced numerous independent documentaries that have aired on PBS and in various film festivals including Charm City (1996), Song in the Crisis (2004), Sovereign Nation/Sovereign Neighbor (2006), The Good Radical (2009), Sick Building (2014) and Jalen and Joanna: A Lead Paint Story (2017). She is also the director of the 2018 "Can We Talk? Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented People of Color" series. In 2024, she will release two feature length films, Decolonizing Science and Harm in the Water.

 

She has received several fellowships, grants and awards for her work, including two Fulbright Scholar Awards: Tanzania (2001) and Jamaica (Specialist, 2004); The Rhode Island Film Fellowship for Outstanding Filmmaking (2007); and, the recipient of two Metcalf Awards for excellence in journalism in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, she received a NAACP award for excellence in documentary filmmaking for Jalen and Joanna: A Lead Paint Story. In 2020, she received NSF funding for her film project focusing on various efforts to decolonize science. Also in 2020, she was a Fellow at MIT's Open Documentary Lab (2020-2021).

 

She has been well recognized for her work to support diversity and inclusion. In 2020, she was honored to receive the Faculty Excellence Award for Diversity at the University of Rhode Island. And in 2021-2022, she was selected to be one of 10 faculty members to serve as a mentor in the Mellon Faculty of Color Working group as a mentor. And in 2024, she received the American Geophysical Union Award for Advancing Inclusive Excellent in STEM. 

 

She is a well regarded public speaker and instructor who has presented at national conferences, federal agencies, colleges and universities throughout the U.S. In 2016, she was commended by Crain's magazine as one of 10 professors of merit in the field of journalism education. 

 

She has been on several boards including Story in the Public Square, The Rhode Island Black Film Festival and The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting. She has long been active in mentoring women of color interested in documentary film production. 

 

She earned her B.A. from Syracuse University in Latin American Studies and an M.A. in Media Studies and documentary film from The New School for Social Research. She completed her  PhD, in art and philosophy, at The European Graduate School. 

 

She resides in Rhode Island with her husband and daughter.