A free public screening of Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls will be held Thursday, October 25, at 2:00 p.m. in room 184 of the RTFP (Radio, TV, Film & Performing Arts) Building. After the screening, Michele Forman -- associate producer of the film -- will field questions from the audience.

Forman will then give a presentation on Working in Feature Film Development in the RTVF Master of Fine Arts Colloquium class at 7:00 p.m. in RTFP 282. This event is also open to the public.

Forman is director of Visual Literacy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and co-director of the Digital Community Studies Program which is an interdisciplinary minor she founded in 2003. The program's aim is to connect college students with crucial community issues in the Greater Birmingham area through documentary filmmaking, digital storytelling, and multimedia-based research.

Her UAB Media Studies Program work has created a student-produced archive of more than 120 community-based social justice short films. The films are available free of charge online, streaming from both the UAB Mervyn H. Sterne Digital Collection and the DCS Vimeo Channel. Program partnerships include McWane Science Center, UAB School of Public Health, Sidewalk Film Festival, Vulcan Park and Museum, Red Mountain Park, WBHM, and the national oral history project, StoryCorps. Media Studies is supported in part by the Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues Initiative.

Forman is a documentary filmmaker who gained experience as an executive in feature films. As director of development at Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, she was responsible for acquiring and developing new projects, including New Jersey Drive, Girl 6, Sula, The Jackie Robinson Story, and Summer of Sam. She also served as associate producer on Lee's Academy Award-nominated film 4 Little Girls, a feature-length documentary for HBO about the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Since 1997, Forman has been directing and producing documentary projects for film and television, earning an Emmy nomination in 2001 for Coat of Many Colors. Her most recent feature-length documentary is Climb for the Cause: A Breast Cancer Story (2007) centered on five women who became activists for women's health after surviving breast cancer. The film follows the women's effort to raise money and raise awareness about what women can accomplish after cancer during which they climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, one of the world's tallest peaks.

Forman began her film work at Harvard University, where she double-majored in English and filmmaking. She consults on media pedagogy in higher education and media messaging for a number of non-profit organizations.