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Amrys O. Williams | Director

Amrys O. Williams was born and raised in Albany, NY. She received her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 2002 in Brain and Cognitive Science and worked at MIT for a few years after graduating. She began a graduate program in the History of Science department at UW-Madison in 2005 and received her master’s degree in 2007.

Currently working on her Ph.D., Amrys’s research interests are at the intersections of history of science/technology/medicine and environmental and agricultural history; her MA paper was on 4-H clubs in Wisconsin in the 1930s and 1940s and how the state’s 4-H club leadership drew on ideas from ecology and rural sociology to promote a holistic vision of rural reform during a period of economic and environmental crisis. Her dissertation research will expand upon this, and will likely relate to the history of 4-H clubs nationwide and abroad (e.g. the International Farm Youth Exchange).

“I Have a Sister” is Amrys’s first film. It grew out of a course on making documentary films about issues relating to the environment and was made possible by the artists- in-residence program, co-taught by her advisor, Gregg Mitman, and the environmental filmmakers Judith Helfand and Sarita Siegel. Amrys notes, “So technically I made other little films, but they were all less than a minute long. Other than that, I don’t really have any experience in the world of filmmaking.”