Born 1955

Steve Rowland’s audio documentaries are laced with sound and voices that speak with the wisdom of diverse viewpoints. In producing his audio works, Mr. Rowland may from time to time seek the advice of experts, artists and composers. Or he may rely on the unique wisdom that his subjects can only have obtained by living lives that are at once revealed as simultaneously ordinary and heroic. An example of Mr. Rowland’s capacity to blend the voices of expertise and experience can be found in his autobiographical Meditation on Race. Here, Mr. Rowland speaks to his wife and five year-old son. Here, he sits on a park bench with Cornell West talking about black heroes. Here, he listens to tapes of his deceased grandmother, who never met her son’s family. In this peculiar conversation, made possible by recorded voices, time moves fluidly as Mr. Rowland recreates the events surrounding a racially motivated assault he experienced long ago in a Philadelphia bar room. The episode occurs in weird retrospect with dissonant music and curiously removed narration and, though it is the inspiring incident that provokes Mr. Rowland’s Meditation on Race, it is eventually subsumed by the conversations that frame it. Thus, the listener hears memory and knowledge transformed through sharing it with others; experience is absorbed into wisdom. Steve Rowland received his Bachelor of Arts in Radio, Television, and Film from Temple University, where he also studied ethnomusicology. Mr. Rowland was the executive producer of The Miles Davis Radio Project, a series hosted by Danny Glover, which offered an extensive analysis of Davis’s career and received a 1991 Peabody Award. Mr. Rowland’s series The Music Makers is comprised of seven individual documentaries focusing on such artists as Carlos Santana, Frank Zappa, George Clinton, and Patti LaBelle, and was broadcast nationally in 1996. His work has been supported by media production grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Council in the Arts. Among his awards and honors are several Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Major Armstrong Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, and an Ohio State Award. His works are collected by the Museum of Television and Broadcasting.