Augusta Palmer

Augusta Palmer is a filmmaker, scholar, and hoarder of ancient mixtapes. films which foreground the centrality of culture in all human experience. Culture –the intersection of language, art, popular media, and public ritual – is the lens through which we perceive our world. Her current project, SPECTRUM  is a feature documentary that examines the art, science and culture of color.

She is best known for her music documentaries, which unspool their stories from the bottom up rather than from the top down, using music as a critical path to the heart of history and culture. THE HAND OF FATIMA (2009), is a feature documentary about music, mysticism and family history. Her 2023 feature, THE BLUES SOCIETY, a documentary about the Blues revival, as seen through the lens of Memphis Country Blues Festival (1966-1970), won an Audience Award at Indie Memphis and Best Documentary at the Oxford Film Festival. Augusta

Palmer’s documentary work has been supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her animated fiction short, A IS FOR AYE-AYE: AN ABECEDARIAN ADVENTURE (2016) screened at children’s film festivals from New York to New Zealand, and her 2023 fiction short, ORDER MY STEPS, has played at over 20 film festivals around the world.

Palmer holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.  has taught Filmmaking and Film Studies at St. Francis College, Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, N.Y.U., and the School of Visual Arts.