Meet the director: Abraham Felix on his early love of reading, his parents’ influence and making a video with LeVar Burton

Growing up in Baton Rouge, La. with his five brothers, director Abraham Felix found a love for reading early in life. He credits his parents with instilling a love for reading in him and his siblings from a young age.

“My parents could see from a young age the difference that reading, the ability to read, played in people’s lives,” he said.

“There was a lot of illiteracy in both of their families. So they made a strong decision when they started having children that they were going to teach us to read as soon as we possibly could learn to do so. So all of my brothers and I became very early avid readers. We lived in the library growing up. Any day we weren’t in school, we were checking out the literal limit of books we could check out and reading them all in a week and bringing them back the next week and doing it all again.”

Felix majored in journalism in college, before finding his way into film. Before directing Osmo’s video with the company’s new Chief Reading Officer, LeVar Burton, he recently directed the award-winning PSA ‘The Unspoken Curriculum’ for Boris L. Henson Foundation. In 2020, he won awards in the Houston Cinema Arts Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival for his work. 

Like most reading enthusiasts, he said he grew up a fan of Burton’s work and was thrilled to be able to work with him to showcase his partnership with Osmo.

“What was really special about LeVar’s message is that the ability to read is one thing, but loving to read is another,” Felix said. “I think anything we can do as adults in this society to get kids to love reading is pretty much the important thing we can do.”