About
Steve Ross’s films have won numerous awards and been screened at many film festivals.
His award-winning documentaries include
Oh Freedom After While, the story of a 1939 demonstration by impoverished sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri;
Black Diamonds, Blues City, which brought the story of The Memphis Red Sox of the old Negro Baseball Leagues to a national audience.
At The River I Stand, the definitive chronicle of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and the last crusade of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Made in collaboration with Departmental colleagues David Appleby and Allison Graham, it was first broadcast nationwide in 1993 and was honored by the Organization of American Historians as the year’s outstanding film on American History.
Working on these three films with narrators Samuel L. Jackson, Julian Bond, and Paul Winfield, Steve gave us a trilogy about race relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century Mid South that has been seen on television by hundreds of thousands of viewers and is still shown in high school and college classrooms across America.
Steve followed with another trilogy of documentaries – this time focusing on the arts.
Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude, remains the only full-length documentary on that great American painter. Seven years in the making, the two-part, two-hour film has been featured at many major museums in The United States and Great Britain, and broadcast nationwide on PBS stations.
Kallen Esperian: Vissi d’arte was Steve’s next portrait of an artist. This documentary followed six months in the life of the noted Soprano, as she worked her way back from a series of misfortunes that had taken her away from the world’s great opera venues.
A Ballet Season, his third film in this trilogy on the arts, had its premiere broadcast on Memphis public television in 2021.
Steve has also made fiction films, translating the works of two Pulitzer Prize winning writers.
A Game of Catch is a short film adapted from the story by the great poet Richard Wilbur.
The Old Forest brought to cinematic life Peter Taylor’s memorable story of 1937 Memphis. Invited to several film festivals in The United States and Europe, and was shown many times to a national primetime audience on The Arts and Entertainment Network.
Awarded a lifetime membership by The University Film and Video Association, the national association of academic film making and studies, Steve served as UFVA President, Conference Vice President, and board member of its Foundation during over twenty five years of service to UFVA.
As a teacher he has been sharing his passion for the medium with college students for nearly half a century. He has taught at Wesleyan University, Temple University, and Sacred Heart University; Steve has received several honors from the University of Memphis, including its highest honor, the Eminent Faculty Award.
In addition to his film making and academic honors, Steve was awarded a Southern Arts Federation fellowship at The American Academy in Rome, and a residency at the Yaddo writers colony in Saratoga, New York.
Since 2021, at the request of The University of Memphis Association of Retirees (UMAR) Steve has presented a well-attended monthly film series devoted to classic films. He has also continued to accept invitations to present his own work, most recently at Dixon Gallery and Gardens, where he serves on that museum’s Visual Arts Committee. Steve currently also serves on the Memphis Film Commission.