Maria Williams-Hawkins
Professor in Department of Media
Dr. Maria Williams-Hawkins received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1994, and has been a faculty member at BSU since 1993, teaching in the Department of Media and hosting community oriented programs for WIPB-TV. Prior to coming to Ball State, she was a tenured faculty member at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.
She also worked at WREG-TV in Memphis, TN and KMOS-TV in Warrensburg, MO. She formerly owned Video Verification, a corporate media production company in Huntsville, TX. She has taught courses in News Writing, Reporting and Photography, Ethics, Media Criticism and taught in Beijing, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Brazil and helped plan a multi-campus project to help Moi University in Kenya. Her combined community service and teaching always focuses on including culture, ethnicity, gender and ability groups while partnering with Nursing, Social Work and Criminal Justice to create instructional opportunities. She helped students create videos for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease families and college-aged students wanting wedding videos.
She is advisor to the National Association for Black Journalists and the Black Graduate Student Alliance and former convener of Kaleidoscope, a conference that introduced students to media anchors and executives from around the region. Dr. Maria, as her students call her, is a minister, a wife and mother and the winner of the university’s first Diversity Advocate Award for 2009 among other recognitions.