The lectureship, sponsored by Brown University and the Goldway-Shearer family, was established in memory of Casey Shearer, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died in May 2000, days before he was to graduate from Brown. Previous speakers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg, ESPN anchor Chris Berman, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC analyst Cokie Roberts, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, film director Davis Guggenheim, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson, food activist Curt Ellis, and writer Pico Iyer.
Zimbalist, who graduated from Brown in 2000, and Casey Shearer were classmates.
Prior to the lecture, winners of the annual Casey Shearer Memorial Awards for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction will be announced.
Jeff Zimbalist
Zimbalist is an Emmy Award-nominated writer, director, and editor whose films have been broadcast on HBO, MTV, PBS, ESPN, Channel 4 UK, the BBC, BET, and The Sundance Channel, and theatrically distributed worldwide.
In 2010 with his brother Michael, Zimbalist directed, produced, and wrote The Two Escobars, which premiered internationally as an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival and has won numerous international festival awards. Zimbalist’s Favela Rising was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 2005, and has won 36 international awards. Zimbalist’s most recent film, Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, premiered as an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival 2011.
All Rise Films, Zimbalist’s production company, is a Ford Foundation grant recipient that has produced award-winning documentaries on Third World development issues for clients including the United Nations and the World Bank. Zimbalist’s segment on “The Addiction Project,” HBO’s 14-part series on drug abuse, continues to appear on HBO.
Zimbalist earned his undergraduate degree from Brown in 2000. Between film projects he has been a faculty member at both the New York Film Academy and the Maine Photographic Workshops.
Casey Shearer
Casey Shearer, a member of the Class of 2000, was a vibrant and talented member of the Brown community. An economics concentrator, he also studied Spanish, political science, and literature, and helped revive Brown Student Radio (WBSR). He was best known on campus as the station’s play-by-play sports announcer and as the author of the weekly sports column “On the Case,” published in the College Hill Independent.
Shearer was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother, Ruth Goldway, once served as mayor. He graduated from high school in Finland, where his father, Derek Shearer, an Occidental College professor, served as U.S. ambassador. A top student at Brown, Shearer was a member of the economics honor society and received his magna cum laude pin the Friday before he was to graduate. That same day, during a regular pick-up game of basketball, Shearer’s heart stopped and he collapsed. Four days later, he died of an undetected heart virus, two months before his 22nd birthday.