NC woman hopes to be a ‘voice’ on presidential arts committee for those who are left out

Diane Robertson, an award-winning documentary film producer, from Carrboro, has been appointed to the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Arts.

She was among 14 people chosen by President Joe Biden earlier this month.

The committee, made up of civic and cultural leaders, serves as representatives of their communities and “Ambassadors for the Arts” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, according to a White House news release. President Dwight Eisenhower established the committee in 1958 to give “its members the opportunity to share with the Kennedy Center their views on the Center’s artistic programming.”

Robertson, who also is a voting rights advocate and horticultural designer, has lived in North Carolina for 30 years. She told The News & Observer she was “delighted and surprised” by the appointment.

She said she hopes her time on the committee will help create funding and grant opportunities for artists in local communities across the country.

“There’s a real direct connection for me to be able to bring my understanding of the values of North Carolina in particular,” she said. “I hope I’ll be a voice for expanding resources for places that may be marginalized and left out.

“We think of the arts in terms of New York and California and Chicago,” she said. “But there’s a lot that needs to happen in the flyover country that is of value, and if I can be a voice for that, that would to me be a real contribution.”

‘The Paris of the Piedmont’

Though Robertson said she has lived in North Carolina longer than anywhere else, she noted she’s spent time in communities across the nation, developing “a real sense of the diversity that makes up the country.” She was born in Jamaica, but moved to New York as an infant when her parents immigrated to the U.S.

Robertson grew up in Queens before moving to Ohio to study at Case Western Reserve University and Indiana for a graduate program at Indiana University.

“After that, I sort of started this itinerant travel across the country,” she said. “I got married in Maine. I moved to south Texas and lived there for 13 years before coming to North Carolina with my children.

“I always felt that was a big part of how I saw the country,” she added. “I really feel I have a sense of the differences and regional differences, good and bad, that make this American experiment.”

When she arrived in North Carolina, Robertson started a horticultural design business, spending the next 20 years procuring plants and crafting residential gardens across Wake, Durham, Orange and Chatham counties.

Robertson, who lives in Carrboro, calls the town “the Paris of the Piedmont.”

“It is a town with a lot of creativity,” she said. “And it is accessible — the people that are involved in those things, you see them in your day-to-day life.

“There’s a lot of human tactile connection, living in Carrboro,” she added.

‘A way of reaching people en masse’

In 2007, Robertson became involved in the campaign of former President Barack Obama.

“That really sent me on a different direction,” she said. “I really became very involved in the political life of the country and my state.”

After Obama’s election, Robertson served as a regional field director for Organizing for America, working on local elections in Orange and Durham counties in 2010.

Robertson also served as the political action chair of the Chapel Hill, Carrboro branch of the NAACP, working to promote voting engagement and participating in litigation against voter suppression laws.

She later turned to documentary filmmaking, which she described as a “merge of my training as a historian and my interest in public affairs and political change.”

The documentaries she’s worked on as a producer have focused on progressive politics and change, she said.

Past films have followed Bakari Sellers’ unsuccessful 2014 campaign for lieutenant governor in South Carolina, as well as three women seeking to flip Republican U.S. House seats in the 2018 midterm elections, Robertson said.

U.S. Illinois House Rep. Lauren Underwood’s campaign was among those the latter film covered.

“In order to bring change, people have to understand,” Robertson said. “Documentary is a way of reaching people en masse and hopefully changing hearts and minds in what they see.”

Robertson said her artistic endeavors and civic engagement have been naturally intertwined.

“If I look at a world where I want people to be enlightened and educated and engaged, creativity is a big part of that,” she said. “And the arts, I think, expand people’s appreciation and inclusivity about others.

“There’s a different vocabulary about politics and art,” Robertson added. “But the underlying values, for me, are not different.”