Historian and documentary film producer Malinda Maynor Lowery, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, was born in Robeson County, N.C., and raised in Durham, N.C. She earned a bachelor's degree in history, cum laude, from Harvard University, a master's degree in documentary film and video production from Stanford University, a master's degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has served as a lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, an assistant professor in the Department of History at Harvard University, an assistant and associate professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, director of the Southern Oral History Program and the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and coordinator of the Lumbee River Fund. In 2021, Lowery was named the second Cahoon Family Professor in American History in Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.
Lowery has focused much of her career on questions pertaining to Native culture, identity and migration. Films on these topics include: In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Books on these topics include The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle and Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation, both published by UNC Press. She also writes and teaches on other topics, including Southern history, religion, music, and foodways. Other documentary film projects include co-producing the Markay Media productions Private Violence, A Chef's Life, and Road to Race Day.
