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Dr. Derby, with Producer Director David Shulman, and others, Co-produced the film, “Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi,” narrated by Danny Glover, and screened in 2016 at the Pan African Film Festival. The Smithsonian produced another version of the film as “Mississippi Inferno.” It received the Television Academy Honors Awards, June 2016, which includes her documentary photographs. She was Executive Producer of Baobab Flowers, produced and directed by Afro Brazilian Afro Peruvian film maker Gabriela Watson. Her professional career was that of an educational administrator, documentary photographer and author. She earned her BA Degree from Hunter College, NYC in 1962. She later received her MA and Ph.D. in Cultural/Social Anthropology, specializing in African American Studies, at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana in 1980. Throughout her life she was a supporter and initiator of the creative arts.

She was also an avid writer and spent a lot of time at the Schomburg Library (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) in Manhattan, New York. The Schomburg Library had a collection of African, and African American heritage that provided context while fueling her interest and devotion to the preservation of Black studies. She later was co-founder (along with John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses) of the Free Southern Theater (FST) in 1964 as an integrated drama workshop at Tougaloo, Mississippi.

“We started in September 1963, and John O’Neal was one of the members of the project. Gilbert Moses was working as a reporter at The Mississippi Free Press. As they got to know each other, John and Gilbert decided to get an apartment together in Jackson. As we worked together in the literacy project, John and I started talking about the need for a cultural arm of SNCC.”