by Hope Kelham

A conversation with Sophia Abrams

When Sophia Abrams, UW-Madison Class of 2022, joined the production team for Seen & Heard, she was doing the work that makes the content coming to your television possible. This HBO documentary, produced by Issa Rae and directed by Giselle Bailey and Phil Bertelsen, explores the history of Black representation in American television. Abrams’ role as a Production Assistant was to dig through archives to surface niche television programs from the 1960s, track down footage, and transcribe interviews with filmmakers. “I got to read all these interviews with all these filmmakers,” she shares, noting how this work informed her artistry. “I’m hearing about their history and how they made it.” The documentary premiered at SXSW and aired on HBO in September 2025. It featured Issa Rae, Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, and others.

Abrams’ compounding curiosity is now fueling two projects that each feel like natural extensions of the other. As a Collections Research Assistant for the Bronzeville Center for the Arts (BCA) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a museum focused on being an artistic hub in the Midwest that makes “art of the African diaspora a central focus in the cultural consciousness”, Abrams is researching Midwest artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. She works under the leadership of Executive Director Ra Joy with the Collections Committee, Chaired by Dr. Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis and consisting of eight other prominent professionals in the arts, to research artists of African descent and institutions across the Midwest. 

She is also finishing Shifting Space, the coming-of-age film she wrote and co-produced alongside fellow UW-Madison alums, currently in its final stretch of editing. The film follows three young women navigating early adulthood: relationships, new cities, and the confusion that comes with becoming. Abrams aims for a festival premiere, with plans to bring it to local gallery screenings alongside musicians and visual artists whose work feels in conversation with the film’s world.

Both projects, the archival research and the filmmaking, stem from the same instinct, which she links directly to her time in African American Studies at UW-Madison; the major taught her to be curious, to think critically, and to see her own work within the context of larger traditions. For every project, she builds herself a reading list. “A syllabus,” she notes. “Most of the problems or curiosities that we’re encountering, someone else has encountered those things before too.” For Abrams, history is context just as it is good company to keep.