William Greaves (October 8, 1926 – August 25, 2014) was a multidimensional talent who served as an executive producer, director, producer, writer, editor, sound technician, cameraman, dancer, drama teacher, and Broadway actor. Growing up in Harlem, NY, he took up drawing at the age of four. By the age of fourteen, he was considered one of the seventy-five best artists in New York state and received a scholarship to study in a special art course at the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village. While attending Frederick Douglass Junior High School, he began composing songs and studying the trumpet. Greaves then studied engineering for a year and half at City College before leaving in 1944 and joining the African Dance Company of Sierra Leone. He was accepted into the renowned Pearl Primus Dance Troupe, followed by the American Negro Theatre. On Broadway, Greaves acted alongside Sidney Poitier and Anthony Quinn, and won membership into the Actors Studio.

In the 1950s, after becoming infuriated by the stereotypical depictions of African Americans presented on television and on Broadway, Greaves decided to become a filmmaker. He studied film production at the New Institute for Film with Hans Richter at the Film Institute of City College. At the same time, he studied African history at the Schomburg Center and the Ethiopian Library with William Leo Hansberry. In 1961, Greaves was offered a position with the United Nations as Public Information Officer with their International Civil Aviation Organization in Canada. In 1964, he left the United Nations and started William Greaves Production, Inc.

Greaves produced over 200 documentary films, won more than 70 international film festival awards, an Emmy award as executive producer of Black Journal, and received four additional Emmy nominations. He is also the winner of special image awards from the NAACP and the National Urban League as well as the recipient of an Indy Special Life Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. In 1980 alone he was honored at the Actors Studio with the Dusa Award, was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, and received a special homage at the first Black American Independent Film Festival in Paris.

The William Greaves Collection covers the years 1968-2003 and serves to capture the impact William Greaves has had on documentary filmmaking in the United States. The collection consists of materials related to Greaves’s work on the NET program, Black Journal, news clippings featuring reviews and analyses of Greaves’s films, photographs, promotional materials, and writings and speeches by Greaves. The photographs include photographs of Greaves as well as production stills from his films Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) and Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2001). The promotional materials include posters, pamphlets, advertisements, press kits, and miscellaneous materials related to Greaves’s body of work.

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