Film director Rex Miller’s childhood bedroom also served as his parents’ “tennis room.” A photograph there on the wall showed his mother, a tennis player, posing next to Althea Gibson at a tennis club outside Philadelphia. His mother always remembered her lost match against the champion Gibson with pride. It was Gibson’s tennis achievements that initially drew Miller to tell her story, but it was also her other accomplishments — recording a jazz album, earning a college degree, acting in a John Ford film — that intrigued the director and led to his documentary Althea.
Rex Miller is a visual storyteller, whose photographs have appeared in major international publications such as Newsweek, New York Magazine, Time, NY Times, Rolling Stone. In 1997 Miller completed All The Blues Gone, a hardcover book/CD package documenting Mississippi blues culture. He is co-producer and cinematographer of A Chef’s Life (2013-2014), a 13-part series broadcast nationally on PBS stations, which received a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast. Learn more about his recent work on the Althea film site.
