Gina Belafonte honors the ancestors of the Civil Rights movement through her art and social activism.
On May 12, 2023, Gina Belafonte—
the youngest child of Julie and Harry Belafonte—was awarded the Purchase College President’s Award for Distinguished Alumni at the 2023 Purchase College Commencement.
“As a Belafonte, I carry the mantle of my family’s continuing legacy, which is among one of the many greatest privileges of my life,” Belafonte said in her acceptance speech. “But I stand before you today as a woman of privilege because I have a calling. I have a purpose, and that purpose is one of the greatest privileges that any human can experience in a lifetime: an awareness of something greater than myself.”
Born and raised in New York City, Belafonte accepted the baton passed to her by her late father, spending her life at the intersection of art and activism—or “artivism,” as she calls it—becoming an award-winning producer, director, actress, and social justice advocate in the process.
As an artist, Belafonte has produced several international and critically acclaimed documentaries that have aired on HBO, PBS, and Prime—some of which include Sing Your Song, exploring the extraordinary life and legacy of her late father; A Survivor’s Guide To Prison; and The March, a 2013 documentary about the 1964 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
As an activist, Belafonte’s work today is mainly channeled through her role as executive director and CEO of Sankofa, the social justice organization she and her father founded following the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin. Sankofa stages a wide range of educational and organizational events, with both contemporary artists and grassroots partners, to center the voices of the marginalized and disenfranchised to promote peace, justice, and equality.
“Directing and producing are my strong suits, but I’m really a cultural organizer,” Belafonte says, now speaking from her home in California. “My producing skills come in handy as it relates to cultural organizing: being inventive and creative and innovative in the way we bring people together, using art as a tool to educate and activate and motivate people to action.”
Belafonte’s main theory of change is that every generation of activists passes on to the next ways to organize new ideas through the structure of powerful, time-tested models to move our collective social consciousness to the next tipping point.
“We’ve seen that with different protests, where the models of protesting haven’t really changed, but we just kept applying pressure,” Belafonte says. “Younger people kept seeing what the elders were doing and moved the agenda even more forward.”
In Belafonte’s mind, organizations like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and the Movement For Black Lives—and, of course, Sankofa—are cut from the same mold as the trailblazing NGOs of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“It’s just newer generations taking what the elders and ancestors have left,” Belafonte says, “using it to not only reinterpret, perhaps, but also reclaim, and move forward.”
While there have been many key moments across her artistic and activist career that Belafonte has been proud of, there are two that are particularly meaningful for her.
“I’m really very excited about Sankofa and carrying that legacy forward,” Belafonte says, “and I’m proud that my father publicly endorsed me as the person to do that. But,” she adds, “I’m most proud of my daughter, who has come on board at Sandoval as our creative director. I’m proud that the work I’ve continued to do throughout my career has inspired her to do the same.”
