Matthew Barr
Matthew Barr. has always had a deep interest in filmmaking: he made his first 16-mm film with a Bell & Howell wind-up camera when he was 13. He holds a BA from San Francisco State College and an MFA from UCLA in film production. He has worked as a still photographer, been a freelance screenwriter, worked on an organic farm, driven a rig cross country, and spent five seasons with a traveling carnival show. As a screenwriter, he co-wrote the scripts for two movies produced in Hollywood, Deadly Blessing (1981) and The Forgotten (1989), as well as other scripts that were optioned but never saw the light of day. While teaching at the University of Miami In 1990, he moved into documentary production with Crimes of Hate, a film produced in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League as a training tool for police departments in recognizing and combating hate crimes. Barr has made three feature-length documentary films that have won acclaim and are in the collections of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as well as online at Folkstreams.net. Crimes of Hate and Wild Caught have both had extensive use as political advocacy films. He has taught film production at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro since 1994. Together with his wife, Cornelia Wright Barr, he founded the Unheard Voices Project in 2006. Barr is an Associate Professor who teaches screenwriting, film production and studies courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.