Crowing Rooster Arts records, 1964-2024

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Summary

Creator:
Crowing Rooster Arts (Firm), Human Rights Archive (Duke University), Kean, Katharine, Ives, Kim, Belle, David, Stern, Rudi, Vanloo, Babeth M., Aboudja., and Maysles, Albert
Abstract:
The Crowing Rooster Arts records contain original film, video, and audio resources as well as company records associated with Crowing Rooster Arts, a documentary and music production company focusing on Haiti's struggle for democracy and on labor, human rights, and immigration policy in Central America and the United States. Acquired as part of the Human Rights Archive.
Extent:
233 Linear Feet (6 processed boxes, 187 unprocessed boxes)
40 Terabytes (MP4 and MOV video files; WAV audio files.)
Language:
Materials in French, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and English.
Collection ID:
RL.13116

Background

Scope and content:

The Crowing Rooster Arts records contain original film, video, and audio resources as well as company records associated with Crowing Rooster Arts, a documentary and music production company focusing on Haiti's struggle for sovereignty and democracy, with a particular focus on the 1990s and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The collection also contains films on international labor, human rights, and immigration policy. The collection contains finished and raw footage for Crowing Rooster Arts's nine full length documentaries and 23 documentary shorts, as well as for unfinished projects, in analog, digitized, and born-digital formats. This collection guide groups together productions (finished or unfinished) using project codes created by Crowing Rooster Arts to database their resources. Except in cases where productions have only one resource (physical film or video, or digital file), the list of digital files associated with productions is kept in a separate spreadsheet. A comprehensive list of audiovisual resources that are currently accessible in the Crowing Rooster Arts records, along with descriptions where available, is linked here.

Biographical / historical:

Crowing Rooster Arts (CRA) is a New York-based, not-for-profit media company founded in 1992 by filmmakers Rudi Stern, Katharine Kean, and Babeth, following the PBS national broadcast of their award-winning documentary Haiti: Killing the Dream, narrated by Ossie Davis and presented by Jonathan Demme. After 1995 Crowing Rooster was led by Katharine Kean, David Belle and Albert Maysles. CRA's mission has largely been to produce films, videos and recorded music that chronicle, analyze, and give life to Haiti's continuing struggle for democracy and self-determination.

From 1992 to the early 2000's CRA produced short films and full length documentaries as well as albums of music and poetry. During this period CRA inherited and/or acquired historic film and video collections, including a highly-regarded documentary on Haiti, Bitter Cane (1983). Crowing Rooster Arts also produced a series of short films with the National Labor Committee that cover labor and human rights in Central America, while other non-Haiti work produced by CRA includes the documentary Abandoned: The Betrayal of America's Immigrants (2000). Crowing Rooster was instrumental in the founding of Haiti's Festival Film Jakmel and its subsequent sister projects, such as the Cine Institute (Haiti's only film school) which grew to become the Artists Institute. Albert Maysles passed away in 2015, and Katharine Kean passed in 2024 after a decade long struggle with cancer. Today Crowing Rooster Arts is led by David Belle, Kenneth Ives, Rebekah Maysles and Joanne Spadaro . In 2025 CRA donated its entire audio visual archive to Duke Universtiy.

Source: David Belle correspondence, March and November, 2025.

Emperor Aboudja of Lakou Soukri-Danach, whose given name was Ronald Derenoncourt, was a Haitian Vodou Priest, a traditional music producer, a master drummer, a videographer and a fixer for leading news organizations working in Haiti during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Known as Aboudja, he was the co-founder of legendary Haitian roots band "Samba Yo" and in 1996 became the Emperor of Lakou Soukri, one of Haiti's three most important mystical sites in the Artibonite department around Gonaïves. Soukri initiates practice in the Kongo rite, belonging to the Loa Ginen family. He was a leading figure in the defense of Vodou worship and practices in Haiti, contributing to many articles, books and documentary films on the subject.

Aboudja had a decades long collaboration with the North American producers of Crowing Rooster Arts, assisting in the production of many of their films and videos and later becoming the lead producer on the entire collection of Crowing Rooster's Tradition Music of Haiti series, where he often recorded ceremonies live in their traditional rural settings with multiple microphones direct to analog tape, and then painstakingly editing and mixing the recordings in the best modern digital studios in Manhattan.

For his work as a videographer and fixer he provided extensive footage and production support to ABC News and WTN. He was also an actor and appeared in "Lavi Nouyòk" with the Languichatte troupe.

Aboudja passed away from a pulmonary embolism in the Port-au-Prince on Thursday, February 27, 2020.

David Belle is a singer-songwriter, documentary filmmaker and social entrepreneur. He has been involved in the production of dozens of films and videos across the genres of documentary, music video and commercial advertising including: "Zoned for Slavery" (1995), "Haiti Coup De Grace?" (1995), "Something to Hide" (1999), "Abandoned; The Betrayal of America's Immigrants"(2000), "Words of the Elders" (2002), "Mrs Little Bones" (2004), "We are the World for Haiti"(2010) , and "Bending the Arc"(2017). As a social entrepreneur, with the support of film directors Francis Ford Coppola and Jonathan Demme, David co-founded Haiti's national film school Cine Institute, which today is called the Artists Institute. As a former board member and the CEO of Artists for Peace and Justice, David led fundraising for humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti following the nation's devastating 2010 earthquake.

In music, David co-produced the album "Let the Rhythm Lead" (2020) with Rock n Roll Hall of Fame inductee Jackson Browne. For that album David also co-wrote the song "Love is Love" with Browne. David's own solo albums as a singer songwriter are "The Beginning"(2024) and "Raspberry Flow" (2025).

David currently (2025) serves on the Board of Directors for Crowing Rooster Arts and the Kanpe Foundation.

Source: Email correspondence with Kim Ives and David Belle, November 2025.

Kim Ives is a founder of the weekly newspaper Haiti Liberté, where he is an investigative journalist and an editor. Previously, he wrote, edited, and photographed for Haïti Progrès for 23 years.

Ives has made several documentary films about Haiti including Bitter Cane (1983), Another Vision: Inside Haiti's Uprising (2022), and Haiti: Intervention versus Revolution (2024). He is also a board member of Crowing Rooster Arts, a film collective specializing in films on Haiti and the Caribbean, and has been an instrumental team member in the preservation of Crowing Rooster's archive.

Ives has contributed to several books on Haiti including "Dangerous Crossroads" (1994), "The Haiti Files" (1993), "Haiti: A Slave Revolution" (2004), and "Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake" (2012).

Ives has written for numerous other publications including The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, The Progressive, Jacobin, and NACLA Report on the Americas.

In the summer of 2011, Ives coordinated the editing of, as well as wrote and co-authored, several dozen stories based on some 2,000 Haiti-related secret U.S. diplomatic cables provided exclusively to Haïti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks. On December 21, 2022, Ives addressed the United Nations Security Council about Haiti.

Source: Email correspondence with Kim Ives and David Belle, November 2025.

Katharine Kean was a filmmaker, artist, and activist, who founded the iconic Miami Beach Haitian restaurant "Tap Tap" in 1994 and was a close friend of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 1992, she founded Crowing Rooster Arts.

In the 1960s through the 1980s, she was an important figure in the New York art scene, collaborating on film and theater projects around the world with Robert Wilson, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rudy Burckhardt, Jim Neu, Charles Ludlam, Piero Tellini, and Stefan Brecht.

Beginning in 1991, Haiti became the focus of her work and activism, with her best known films being "Killing the Dream" (1992) and "Rezistans" (1997).

Tap Tap became a world-famous restaurant, whose walls were covered with spectacular giant murals painted by Little Haiti's foremost artists. After 2001, Haiti's famous protest singer Manno Charlemagne lived and played there until his death in 2017.

In February 2004, a U.S. Navy SEAL team kidnapped President Aristide from his home in Haiti and flew him into exile in the Central African Republic (CAR). Kean teamed up with Aristide's lawyer, Ira Kurzban, to rent a private jet to fly to CAR with Congresswoman Maxine Waters and others to bring Aristide back to the Western Hemisphere, where he spent three months in Jamaica before passing the rest of his seven-year exile in South Africa. Kean and Kurzban again returned from Africa to the Western Hemisphere on a private jet with Aristide – this time to Haiti – on Mar. 18, 2011. After a decade long fight with cancer, Kean died in her New York home on July 25, 2023.

Source: Email correspondence with Kim Ives and David Belle, November 2025.

Rudi Stern was was an American multimedia artist most widely known for his work in neon. In his later years, he concentrated on making documentary films and multimedia light shows. Stern was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He graduated from Bard College in 1958 with a bachelor's degree in studio arts and from University of Iowa in 1960 with a master's degree. He also studied painting with Oskar Kokoschka and Hans Hofmann.

In the mid-1960s, he moved to New York City, where he met the poet and artist Jackie Cassen. They collaborated on multimedia installations of kinetic art, including the "Psychedelic Celebration Number One" for Timothy Leary, and installations at the Electric Circus nightclub. With video artist and documentarian John Reilly, Stern founded Global Village Video in 1969.

In 1972, he founded Let There Be Neon, a studio and gallery in New York. He designed and produced neon pieces for the Broadway show, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and other art and music performances, as well as commercial signs.

Together with Katharine Kean, Babeth and Hart Perry he directed the 1992 documentary Haití: Killing the Dream. He went on to co-found the non profit media foundation, Crowing Rooster Arts with Kean and Babeth, dedicated to highlighting the stories of oppressed people with a particular focus on Haiti. Through Crowing Rooster, Stern went on to produce multiple short films and the feature documentary film Haiti; Coup de Grace?

Between 1999 and 2001, his multimedia installation "Theater of Light" was shown at multiple locations in New York and New Jersey. The installation involved several screens, more than 30 projectors and "surrounded audience members with densely layered, constantly changing images, intricately choreographed to music."

He died in 2006 at his home in Cadiz, Spain, from complications of lung cancer.

Source: Email correspondence with Kim Ives and David Belle, November 2025.

Acquisition information:
The Crowing Rooster Arts records were received by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library as a gift in 2025.
Processing information:

Processed by Tere Elizalde and Craig Breaden, 2025. Accessions described in this collection guide: 2025-0002.

Because the collection contains thousands of digital files relating to Crowing Rooster Arts productions, the list of files (and the associated digital sets that can be requested) is kept in a separate spreadsheet. A comprehensive list of audiovisual resources that are currently accessible in the Crowing Rooster Arts records, along with descriptions where available, is linked here.

Arrangement:

Audiovisual resources are organized chronologically, where possible, within their respective series.

This collection guide groups together productions (finished or unfinished) using project codes created by Crowing Rooster Arts to database their resources. Except in cases where productions have only one resource (physical film or video, or digital file), the list of digital files associated with productions is kept in a separate spreadsheet. A comprehensive list of audiovisual resources that are currently accessible in the Crowing Rooster Arts records, along with descriptions where available, is linked here.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Contents

Using These Materials

Using These Materials Links:

Using These Materials

Restrictions:

Access note. Collection contains digital audiovisual materials that require special equipment. Contact Research Services with questions.

Access note. Collection contains audiovisual materials that require special equipment. Contact Research Services with questions.

Access note. Some materials in this series are electronic records that need to be reformatted. Access copies of electronic records require special equipment. Contact Research Services for access.

Terms of access:

The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University.

For non-commercial uses, all digital audiovisual access materials (such as MP4 file-formatted materials) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, the terms of which are described at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

For more information on high resolution materials and commercial uses, consult the Rubenstein Library's Citations, Permissions, and Copyright guide, and contact Rubenstein Library Research Services.

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Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Crowing Rooster Arts records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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