Janice Collins
Dr. Collins is a multi-national and international award-winning professional journalist and media expert with more than 35 years of experience in the media industry. She is also an international and national award-winning professor, scholar, researcher of mixed methodology and creative with 21 years of experience on the university level.
She returned to Ohio University, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in August 2023, after earning her M.S. in Journalism at E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2005 and a PH.D. in Mass Communications and Media Arts and Studies and Women and Gender Studies in the Scripps College of Communications in 2009. She specializes in broadcast and digital journalism and storytelling, leadership development, de-marginalization, media storytelling for social impact, and methods of teaching and performing with full inclusion.
Some of her awards include multiple Emmys, Best of Gannett, Associated Press, NABJ, and AABJ for writing, producing, reporting, cinematography, directing, narration and editing. Her documentary and web series, A Taste of Gullah, won Best Documentary at the International Garifuna film Festival Award in Venice, California and has over 15 million views across media platforms including PBS and her comprehensive (5 hours), autoethnography series, “Journey to My Mother’s Land: Extending the Gate’s Effect into Africa,” chronicles her immersion-trip back to her maternal ancestral land of Sierra Leone, West Africa and the Mende tribe was selected for the 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival 2021 and awarded first place in the cinematography category and screened in Paradiso Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. It was also selected for the Accolade Global Film Festival 2021 in La Jolla, California and won Best Director. Her docuseries aired in the U.K., U.S., Canada, and across Africa via NTA, one of the largest, most expansive media broadcasting systems in Africa.
She created a national award-winning website of inclusion called HearMyVoiceOnline.com and has published podcasts, research, articles, and book chapters across disciplines and 3 books for academic and secular audiences as a Best-Selling Author. Her 250 Years and Still a Slave, helps audiences understand race relations in proactive ways, a teacher’s manual Teaching without Borders, dedicated to her students, that introduces educators to her award-winning pedagogy of full inclusion called Active Centralized Empowerment, and a motivational and emotionally-healing humorous book on surviving beyond strokes for caregivers and survivors based on her experience as her mother’s caregiver called, Riding the Rainbow Through the Storms.
In all that she does, she works to bring out the best in people and works to make the world more informed, more educated, kinder, and gentler to one another as a Global family. In proper fashion, she was selected as GAIA INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE 2023 HUMANITY LEADER TOP PICKS. Collins is also a Kopenhaver Fellow.
A military brat and from a huge, non-judgmental, Christian family of 8, she learned to be of service for the best in humanity at an early age. She grew up understanding and practicing: compassion, empathy, effective leadership, effective collaboration, diversity, equity, belonging and full inclusion. She has always believed that each person is born with a special gift, something special they were born with that only they can give to the world. She loves to love others and to see people reach their highest potential, fulfillment, and happiness, especially her students. Janice earned a B.A. in Mass Communications-specializing in Communication/Rhetoric and a certificate in Women’s Studies and was a standout student-athlete and inductee in the ACC Legends Hall of Fame representing Women’s Basketball at Wake Forest University.