received his master's degree in journalism with a specialization in documentary film in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley, having co-produced/co-directed with Peter Webster a master's thesis titled Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, a half-hour video on the history of blues music in Oakland, California. Film career Upon finishing graduate school, Riggs began working on many independent documentary productions in the Bay Area. He assisted documentary directors and producers initially as an assistant editor and later as a post-production supervisor, editor on documentaries about the American arms race, Nicaragua, Central America, sexism, and disability rights. Because of his proficiency in video technology, Riggs was the on-line editor for a video production company, Espresso Productions. In 1987, Riggs was hired as a part-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley to teach documentary filmmaking. He became the youngest tenured professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 1987 he completed his first professional feature documentary Ethnic Notions. An independently produced documentary, the film was inspired by an exhibit of black memorabilia at the Berkeley Art Center of black stereotypes from the collection of Jan Faulkner. The film received technical support (online editing) from KQED, a public television station in San Francisco, and aired on public television stations throughout the United States. In Ethnic Notions, Riggs sought to explore widespread and persistent stereotypes of African Americans – images of ugly, savage brutes and happy servants – in American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Edited by Debbie Hoffmann, the film uses voice-over narration provided by African-American actress Esther Rolle in explaining striking film footage and historical stills which expose the blatant racism of the era immediately following the Civil War. The documentary also presents a set of contemporary interviews with historians George Fredrickson and Lawrence Levine, the cultural critic Barbara Christian, folklorist Patricia Turner, and black memorabilia collector Jan Faulkner, who discuss the consequences of historical African-American stereotypes. The 1989 Marlon completed the landmark experimental documentary film Tongues Untied. Ultimately, it was aired on national PBS as part of the television series P.O.V. The three principal voices of Tongues Untied are those of Riggs, and poets Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam. Tongues Untied had political backlash; Republican Senator Jesse Helms famously argued to defund the arts after its release. In 1988, while working both on Color Adjustment and Tongues