Venise Berry
Popular Culture, African American Cultural Criticism
Broadcast Reporting & Writing
Associate Professor
Ph.D., 1989, University of Texas
E340 Adler Journalism & Mass Comm. Bldg. (AJB)
319-335-3361
venise-berry@uiowa.edu
Venise Berry is an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She received a BA (1977) in Journalism and an MA (1979) in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. Her Ph.D. was awarded in 1989 in Radio. TV and Film at the University of Texas in Austin. Her professional media career began in radio news but has expanded into teaching, media research and criticism, as well as fiction, script and non-fiction writing.
She is the author of three national bestselling novels, So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton/Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton/Penguin 2000) and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton/Penguin/Putnam 2002). In 2003 she received the "Creative Contribution to Literature" award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society. All of Me received a 2001 Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Also in 2001 she was recognized with an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation in Des Moines.
Berry's research is in the area of African American Cultural Criticism. She is developing a theory called racialism which involves the influence of the media on African American images and messages. She is published widely in academic circles with numerous articles based on her research in the area of media, youth and popular culture. Her two most recent non-fiction projects The Historical Dictionary of African American Film (Scarecrow Press, 2005) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel, 2001) are co-authored with her brother S. Torriano Berry, a professor in Film at Howard University in Washington , DC.. She also co-edited book, Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contempary Issues (Sage, 1996) which won the Meyers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997.
Each summer, Berry teaches a one week workshop on writing the popular novel, at the University of Iowa Summer Writers Workshop. She also conducts a number of seminars in the areas of Weight and Wellness: Challenging Myths, Racialism and the Media, Black Music as Communication, and Success in the 21st Century.
For more information visit Venise Berry’s web site at: www.veniseberry.com