Pearlena Igbokwe

thumb Pearlena Igbokwe is a Nigerian-American television executive of Igbo heritage. Quotes Well, I was born in Nigeria and I came to American when I was 6 years old. Although I did speak some English when I got to the States, television was one of my biggest English teachers. I sat in front of the TV and I watched a lot of television because I really didn’t watch TV as a child in Nigeria so I was fascinated by television. My mother tells me I used to walk around the house quoting Bugs Bunny a lot. That’s one of the things I used to watch. So I did grow up as a lover of television and by the time I got to college knew that I wanted to work in this business in some way. I think the most fascinating thing about television for me was that it was in everybody’s home and everyone could watch it. It seemed to be a very democratic medium where it wasn’t the movie theater where you have to leave your house. It was a very comfortable thing that was in your home and to me that was really interesting. That you could bring messages and images into people’s living rooms. I was a huge lover of black and white movies, classic movies. Loved them. Loved, loved, loved them. I don’t know, as a 12, 13 year old, just those Saturday afternoon old movies – I don’t know what it was about them, just maybe the grand scale, the melodrama, which is why I’m a big AMC fan myself, American Movie Classics. It’s strange, but that’s what I watched as a kid is old movies. I was an English major in college, and it was about reading literature and analyzing it, and I took some film courses and I found that it was a very similar thing. I would watch film and I would have to write about it and deconstruct it, and I loved that as well because film is like literature that’s just living. So I found I was able to combine my love of film, which I’d always had with my love of literature and be able to write about it and shape it. I said, “Okay, I think maybe there’s a living in this somewhere.” When I was in college, actually, I had done a summer program, a summer internship with NBC in New York and it was great and it was exciting, so by the time I finished college I said, “You know, I think I would very much like to be in this entertainment business in some way.” I think it was that, it was the fast-paced atmosphere that seemed more exciting. I mean, granted, I hadn’t been as exposed to the film industry at that point, but I hadn’t really thought about television, either. I found that you could make programming on television and it was the kind of thing that affected millions of people. Millions of people were watching NBC and millions of people were talking about the shows on NBC and isn’t that great to be a part of something like that that affects so many people. Pearlena Igbokwe;By Janice Littlejohn on November 17, 2003 External links Category:Businesswomen from the United States Category:Living people Category:1960 births Category:Women born in the 1960s