Black Lines of Code x Tape Collective - Seeking Mavis Beacon Screening

As part of the Black Lines of Code Exhibition experience, we've teamed up with Tape Collective to present two screenings of the documentary: Seeking Mavis Beacon.

Running Time: 102 minutes

Country: USA 
UK Release: 9th May 2025
BBFC Certificate feature: 15
BBFC Certificate trailer: PG

Filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross film their DIY investigation to uncover the woman behind the face of ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’, an educational software programme developed in the 1980s. 

Its defining features permanently live on in the filmmakers’ collective memory - the elegant, smiling Black woman in the cream suit marching off to her high-rise job on the cover of the package and the Black hands with 3in-long acrylic fingernails, overlaid on the screen that clattered as Beacon typed in tandem with her users. Retailers in the 80s were convinced a software programme featuring a dark-skinned Black woman wouldn’t sell, but it ended up becoming one of the most successful and lucrative educational products of all time. 

What became of the influential cover model who vanished decades ago? Their sleuthing uncovers a shocking revelation. What follows leads Jones and Ross to question, in the age of AI and technological omnipresence, who does our image really belong to? 

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

"May Seeking Mavis Beacon function as a time capsule of our younger selves that inspires future generations to keep asking pesky questions with their friends."