Teshome Gabriel

Teshome Gabriel came to the U.S. in 1962, earning degrees from the University of Utah.  Hired as a lecturer at UCLA's school of Theater, Film and Television in 1974, Gabriel also studied here, earning his M.A. and PhD degrees.  He became a full professor in 1995 and served as vice-chair of the Department from 1997-1999.

Gabriel's books include “Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged” and “Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetic of Liberation." He also published many articles and was the founding director of several journals, including “Emergencies” and “Ethiopian Fine Arts Journal.”

Gabriel’s influential 1990 essay "Nomadic Aesthetic and the Black Independent Cinema" received an Opus Award from the “Village Voice” for “charting out a genuinely new theory of black cinema.” The term "nomadic aesthetic," which he coined, has come to be widely used in critical discussions of the art, music and literature of the Third World.

As a faculty member and student at TFT in the 1970s and early 1980s, Gabriel was both a colleague of and a mentor to the African American and African student filmmakers whose work came to define the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, also known as the "L.A. Rebellion.” The group included such soon-to-be-celebrated artists as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Ben Caldwell, Billy Woodberry, Alile Sharon Larkin, Jacqueline Frazier, Jamaa Fanaka and Barbara McCullough.