Dr. Anna Everett
Professor Emeritus of Film, Television and New Media Studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
I am committed to the Santa Barbara community, my home for the past 23 years, and especially to Santa Barbara City College (SBCC). As an Emeritus Professor (retired) from U C Santa Barbara (UCSB) since last year, I am now excited about devoting my decades of experience and training to improving our community, my home, and particularly to serving as a Trustee of SBCC.
I grew up in the nation’s capital, and loved living in Washington, DC off and on amid the historic monuments, museums, and international embassies. I am a proud product of our public school system from K-12 to community college, and beyond. I know how crucial the community college sector of higher education is and what it is charged with accomplishing. I have over 30 years of experience in California’s system of higher education, as both an undergraduate (San Jose State) and graduate student (UCLA and USC), and as a professor at UCSB.
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I relocated to Santa Barbara in 1997 and I have become deeply enmeshed in our beautiful community, volunteering with several important and active community groups and organizations including the, the Santa Barbara County Commission for Women (Commissioner and Former Chair, 2nd District), the League of Women Voters (volunteer), Girls’s Inc. (invited speaker), Santa Barbara Women’s Political Committee (Board Member), and more. At UCSB, I held a number of administrative and leadership positions including Interim/Acting Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy; Chair of the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies, Director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies, and more.
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I am very proud of my extensive international travel and educational work across national boundaries wherein I served as a visiting professor or scholar in the Netherlands (Utrecht), Tunisia (Manouba), Canada (Toronto), Bahamas, to name a few. Some of my awards and honors were as a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar awards, as a Ford Foundation Fellow, and as an expert contributor on the “Taking the Stage” and “Black Hollywood” permanent exhibits at the African American History and Culture Museum in Washington, DC, among others.
I am a published author, and some of my published works include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (for the MacArthur Foundation’s series on Digital Media, Youth, and Learning), AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s.
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I support the mission of SBCC and its minority majority student body of underrepresented populations. One of SBCC’s important roles is to provide a quality two-year education program for transfers to four-year colleges and universities across the nation, including UCSB. My background provides me with the unique skills and knowledge to best serve SBCC’s Board of Trustees at this crucial moment. My own history as a first-generation student in my family to attend college via the critical systems of public education, is evidence of the value, need, and essential perpetuation of SBCC and other public schools for leveling the playing field for all of Santa Barbara’s youth, non-traditional students, and the growing segment of life-long learners in our community.
