Valerie Linson is the series producer for
Basic Black and cultural programs. As a documentary filmmaker, Linson most recently produced
Inheritors of the Faith, the fifth hour of the six-part series
This Far by Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys, a Blackside Inc. miniseries that was broadcast nationally on PBS in June 2003. Linson has also been an associate producer on several PBS series, including
On Our Own Terms: Death and Dying in America (with Bill Moyers),
Free to Dance: African Americans in Modern Dance, and
Soldiers Without Swords: The Black Press (winner of a 2000 DuPont Award and 1999 Sundance Film Festival "Freedom of Expression" Award). She received Emmy nominations for her research for
Free to Dance (1999) and
W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995). Linson has also received Emmy nominations for several
Basic Black programs.
Jesse Logan is the associate producer of
Basic Black. In addition to helping produce the series, she writes the
Basic Black episode descriptions for this website. In May 2008, Logan won a New England Emmy Award in the Advanced Media Writer/Producer category for the
Basic Black Web exclusive
Surviving the War: The Story of James E. Guilford Jr. She began her journalism career at CNN in New York as a production assistant for
American Morning and moved on to AP/researcher in CNN's medical news unit. Logan is a graduate of Howard University and holds a master's in journalism from New York University.
Carrie English is the production assistant for
Basic Black. She has coproduced two video podcasts for WGBH: one profiling an MIT engineer who invented a robot that can "feel" with its hands and another profiling a high school student who is equally passionate about football and art. English interned on
Unnatural Causes, a four-hour PBS series about health disparities, and on
In the Shadow of the House, a documentary about Cuban American photographer Abelardo Morell. An alumna of Queen's University (Canada) and Cambridge University (England), English has been working at WGBH since 2004.
