Filmmakers

Cece Conway grew up eating Texas BBQ ribs, but came to college in NC and has been here long enough to love our smoked port and vinegar sauce, perhaps even more. She received her PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill and is an English Professor at Appalachian State U, where she teaches 20th C American Lit, Folklore, and Appalachian Studies. Cece co-made (with Cheyney Hales) Dink: A Pre-Blues Musician: the film won Best-in-Show in the first NC Film Festival, 1975. She co-made Sprout Wings and Fly: A Portrait of NEA Fiddler Thomas Jefferson Jarrell (with Les Blank, Maureen Gosling, and Alice Gerrard) and two related, also award-winning shorts--Julie and My Old Fiddle. Cece is the author of African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, co-maker (with Scott Odell) of Black Banjo Songsters Vol 1 Smithsonian Folkway CD, BBS Vol 2 forthcoming, and maker of various independent DVDs and CDs. She was a co-organizer of the 1st Black Banjo Gathering, 2005, the Black Banjo Reunion 2010, and the Director of Black and Global Roots Concerts and Documentation (most recently funded by Traditional and Our Town National Endowment for the Arts (2017-2019).