Profile: Michelle Meeks
By Stowe Story Labs Staff
At the helm of NewEnglandFilm.com, Dr. Michele Meek has used her wide reach in the local film industry to make a resoundingly positive impact. Michele is a writer, filmmaker, and professor, who after running NewEnglandFilm.com for over 20 years, is now calling for proposals for new leadership. She began the site in 1997 while she was in Grad school at Emerson College. As she says, “I was really interested in breaking into the film industry, getting to know people, learning what was happening, seeing what other people were making, and how to connect.” The site would begin as a magazine, but it soon grew beyond her expectations. Through the website Michele founded the Online New England Film Festival in 2009, and the site now has a multifaceted program with interviews, job boards, festival reviews, and articles on the industry. “Over time the magazine part has been less important over the years in the sense that it is now one facet of a much larger project.”
Here at Stowe we have been working with NewEnglandFilm.com from our inception by partnering to offer a “NewEnglandFilm.com Fellowship” to Stowe’s Annual Narrative Lab. This is a marketing partnership, where Stowe and NewEnglandFilm.com help spread the work about each other, and Stowe is not compensated for the cost of the free slot to its annual anchor event. . As Michele explains, “We have been partnered with Stowe from the very beginning. My mission always is to help support people to get their work made and seen, and so doing this fellowship has been a way of making that happen.”
The main reason Michele has decided to step down is because of her flourishing creative interests. As a tenure track professor at Bridgewater State, she is guiding students through some of the most important topics of our day like sexual consent. She is a very active researcher, including publishing her book Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos in 2019. As Michele says, “I’ve always been interested in promoting more women filmmakers” but the book also came from after helping take over The Independent Film and Video Monthly. She helped rescue their archives, and her book “really came out of my interest in wanting to somehow make those archives more visible because they are an incredible archive of our film history.” Alongside her efforts with the website, research, and outreach, Michele also has a passion for creating films herself. As she says, “That creative impulse doesn’t go away. Eventually it gets you and it won’t let go.” She directed, Imagine Kolle 37 in 2017, was an associate producer on the film Salvage in 2019, and is currently in pre production on her feature length essay documentary, The Impermanence of Everything.
She hopes that the new leadership of NewEnglandFilm.com would continue the tradition of creating a supportive space for filmmakers. “The mission of NewEnglandFilm has always been to support underrepresented filmmakers. We have always been interested in promoting from our very first issue, filmmakers of diverse backgrounds that are telling stories that are different, and often remain independent.”
Stowe founder David Rocchio had this to say about Michele: “Stowe Story Labs has valued and enjoyed its partnership with NewEnglandFilm.com and with Michele herself. We will miss working with her but hope to keep the tradition of the fellowship alive with whomever steps up to run this important resource, which Michele created out of essentially thin air. Best of luck to Michele now in all of her other many pursuits.
