Angela Smith bio

Angela Smith grew up on the banks of Old Hickory Lake, just outside of Nashville, during the 1960s and ‘70s. Her family’s home was surrounded on three sides by cow pastures, which today have been subdivided and crisscrossed with asphalt. That rural environment and connection to the past gave her the foundation for a career that is now expanding to blend history and technology.

After she graduated from Belmont University in 1984 with a degree in English and communications, she spent 20 years working on the cutting edge of a huge graphic design technology shift as a designer and graphic production specialist. Six years ago, she decided to weave her new media and graphic design experience with her passion for historical understanding, using storytelling and documentary filmmaking as primary tools. To learn more about those areas, she is enrolled in the certificate program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has completed a master’s degree in history at MTSU in May 2007, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in public history.

She’s taking an opportunity to use what she’s learning in hands-on teaching. Among the documentary film projects she has supervised with undergraduate students at Belmont and graduate students at MTSU are Belmont’s beginnings in the 19th century; the transition from Ward-Belmont women’s school to the Baptist-affiliated Belmont College in 1951; the Nashville sit-ins in the early 1960s, the history of RCA’s historic Studio B on Music Row; and historic preservation in the city of Murfreesboro.

She is also collaborating with fellow PhD student, Brian Dempsey, on a documentary about heritage tourism in the Mississippi Delta.

Linda Quigley bio

In the Summarium, a newspaper you’ve never heard of published at a north Alabama elementary school that no longer exists, Linda Quigley, then 11 years old, had her first byline in May 1960. In the next decade or so, she wrote for every student newspaper and local weekly in that little Tennessee River town, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of North Alabama and a master’s in journalism at Penn State University. In her 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, she interviewed hundreds of famous people, from President Jimmy Carter to First Lady Tipper Gore to basketball superstar Kareem Abdul Jabar to French cooking guru Julia Child to NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume and a whole lot of writers, painters, musicians, hairdressers, mountain climbers, gardeners, undertakers, soldiers and moms and dads in between. They all had a story to tell.

As a reporter, she says, you tell people’s stories the best you can. Sometimes their story has been told a hundred times before and you have to find something different. Sometimes it’s the only time anyone will ever tell it, the only time a person’s name will ever be in the newspaper until they die. Even in an ever-changing media world, the day when you can publicly dignify one human being by telling their story to an audience of readers is as important as anything else you’ll ever do.

Now she’s in her seventh year on the media studies faculty at Belmont University. She hopes somebody she teaches this year, or next year or the next, will have as much fun as she did chasing those stories.