Mimi Pickering

Mimi Pickering has been a filmmaker and community media practitioner at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky since 1971, building a career that spans documentary filmmaking, radio production, and community media organizing in one of the country's most enduring place-based media organizations. Her documentary The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man, made in 1975 about the collapse of a coal-waste dam owned by the Pittston Company that killed 125 people and left 4,000 homeless, was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry in 2005. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of multiple Kentucky Arts Council Artist Fellowships, and her films including Chemical Valley, Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song, and Anne Braden: Southern Patriot have established her as one of Appalachian documentary film's most significant voices.

As director of Appalshop's Community Media Initiative, she produces Making Connections News, a WMMT program and podcast exploring sustainable economic options for the coalfields, connecting the organization's media practice to the immediate needs of communities navigating the collapse of the coal economy.

Mimi's work at Appalshop embodies a core community media argument: that the people most affected by social and economic conditions are the ones whose voices should anchor the media that covers them, and that a media organization rooted in place for more than fifty years produces a different kind of journalism than one passing through.