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WINTER 2015 | THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

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Center for Documentary Studies

AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

keeping it real since 1990 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705

DOCUMENT

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a Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

919-660-3663 | Fax: 919-681-7600 | docstudies@duke.edu | documentarystudies.duke.edu

Director: Wesley C. Hogan Associate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnight Art Director: Bonnie Campbell Publishing Director: Alexa Dilworth Communications Director and Document Editor: Elizabeth Phillips Web Design and Production Manager: Whitney Baker Social Media and Digital Projects Manager: Jenna Strucko The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University teaches, engages in, and presents documentary work grounded in collaborative partnerships and extended fieldwork that uses photography, film/video, audio, and narrative writing to capture and convey contemporary memory, life, and culture. CDS values documentary work that balances community goals with individual artistic expression. CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences.

All photographs appearing in Document® are copyright by the artist. | Document® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

CONTENTS

WINTER 2015

FROM THE CENTER 3

By CDS Director Wesley Hogan

AUDIO 8 Let’s Talk CDS Radio

WRITING 4 A New Visiting Writers Series in Ethics, Society, and Documentary Art

FILM 9 News from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

EXHIBITIONS 5 From the World to Lynn: Stories of Immigration Multimedia Work by Andrea Patiño Contreras

EDUCATION 10–11 MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Children Are at the Heart of the Felsman Fellows Program, Open to MFA | EDA Grads

Kabul, Afghanistan Photographs by James Longley Veiled Rebellion: Women in Afghanistan Photographs by Lynsey Addario AWARDS 6–7 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize Winner Jon Lowenstein’s South Side Project Explores His Chicago Neighborhood

Undergraduate Education RIPP Fellowships in the Documentary Arts Foster Faculty Mentoring for Students Continuing Education Distance Learning Opens Virtual Doors to CDS PHOTOGRAPHY 11 Document Duke 360°

A found note, South Side, Chicago, 2014. Ephemera from South Side by 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize winner Jon Lowenstein.

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EE The Center for Documentary CE PIN G IT REAL SIN Studies will celebrate its 25th Anniversary throughout 2015 with a series of events culminating in a gala symposium in the late fall. Visit our dedicated anniversary website for news, highlights, event updates, and more.

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Video still by Jenna Strucko

very day after school, I stayed with my grandparents until dinner. My grandfather and I had an afternoon storytelling ritual—fascinated by his vivid tales about life on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II, I always wanted to hear more. “Not until you finish your math homework,” he’d say, so I became expert in zipping through times tables and long division. He loved cards, and often told his tales over a game of spades, never failing to get up at 5 p.m. sharp to make a gin and tonic. My memories of these moments are infused with cigarette smoke, the crisp plastic smell of new cards, and the citrus-coriander twang of Gordon’s gin.

One afternoon I burst into his house, unable to wait to finish my homework. “Mrs. McFarlane told us about Hiroshima today. She asked if we thought it was the right thing to do. I don’t think it was right,” I announced. “Why did we kill so many people who weren’t fighting in the war?” He closed his open arms and stood dead silent. “Finish your math, and we’ll talk,” he announced in an uncharacteristically stern tone. Perplexed, I rushed through my routine and slunk to the living room. He sat in his usual chair, the gin and tonic already poured. “Perspective is a dreadful bitch,” he said quietly. It shocked me: I’d never heard him use profanity. “I’ve told you that Harry Truman saved my life, and that’s true.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary, he continued, or American soldiers would have had to fight, hand-to-hand, to take every last inch of Japan. We sat for a long time in silence—also a first. “But I suppose that there are missing granddads not telling war stories to their grandkids in Japan today because of it.”

The idea of missing storyteller-grandparents stuck with me. Whose stories are missing? Who gets to tell the stories, and how do they shift depending on the teller and the audience? Such questions of perspective and access are at the center of CDS’s world as we celebrate our twenty-fifth year and think forward, at a time when I witness here each day the convergence of the best documentary traditions with cutting-edge digital tools as our artists, journalists, students, and scholars open new frontiers in the documentary arts.

This expanded landscape is reflected throughout this special 25th Anniversary edition of Document: Workshops

created by MFA|EDA graduates and Felsman Fellows Laura Doggett and Braxton Hood for Syrian refugee girls in Jordan and Turkey, respectively, allow the girls to narrate their own experience in place of the hundreds of journalists who have traveled there. The yearlong Document Duke 360° photo challenge highlights Duke in a kaleidoscope of nontraditional images taken by a wide range of community members. CDS’s new visiting writers series, an expanding repertoire of online Continuing Education classes, and new RIPP Fellowships for undergraduates extend the tools of documentary to a wider range of voices producing thoughtful, creative work, as does Full Frame’s School of Doc summer camp for Durham high school students. The audio program’s multi-year project on sports as contested territory has opened the voices of youth in intense athletic training, among others, to millions of listeners on NPR. The 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize winner, Jon Lowenstein, combines a range of media and tools—black-and-white photos, experimental video, geo-tagging, and social media, to name a few—as he explores his South Side, Chicago, neighborhood. Photographers Lynsey Addario, James Longley, and Andrea Patiño Contreras push open new doors of perception, stretching the frame (Longley), the veil (Addario), and public ignorance (Contreras) beyond convention, so we can reconsider what we know.

This vital rethinking, a practice I first learned from my grandfather, is among the most powerful forms of human knowledge creation we have. It only grows more so as our access to information and tools shift in ways that were unimaginable when CDS opened its doors at Duke University in 1990. To see, for instance, how crowd-sourced documentary practices are evolving in real time worldwide, one need only do a Twitter search for #BlackLivesMatter.

Or watch the evolving Take Back the Archive project and website created by a group of activists, scholars, students and archivists at the University of Virginia as they provide space for an otherwise unwritten history.

Such material provokes thorny questions of authorship, curation, and context for any documentarian, but the tools, thoughtfully used, will help extend the range and impact of documentary perspectives connecting the world—a key priority for CDS as we head into our next twenty-five years.

Please join us; it’s going to be a great, mind-expanding ride.

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BY CDS DIRECTOR WESLEY HOGAN

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COVER: Faces of CDS; photographs by row, left to right. TOP ROW: By Tone Stockenström from the 2005 CDS exhibit Tone Stockenström: Collaborative Projects. By Rob Amberg from his 2002 CDS/UNC Press book Sodom Laurel Album and 2003 CDS exhibit of the same name.

By Ami Howard from the CDS book 25 Under 25 Up-and-Coming American Photographers, Volume Two. CDS film instructor Gary Hawkins, by Pam Cook. Visitor to CDS, by Christopher Sims. SECOND ROW: By Roger LeMoyne, winner of the 2007 Lange-Taylor Prize with Kurt Pitzer. 2008 Lehman Brady Professor Brett Cook, by Christopher Sims. Ann Tome, by Tom Rankin for CDS’s Maasai project in Kenya. Thelonious Monk, by W. Eugene Smith, archived at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, and used in the CCP/CDS Jazz Loft Project.

THIRD ROW: First CDS director Iris Tillman Hill, by Tory Jeffay. By Matt Herron from the 2004 CDS exhibit Oh Freedom Over Me. By 2008 CDS/ Honickman First Book Prize in Photography winner Jennette Williams from her 2009 CDS/Duke Press book, The Bathers. 2004–05 Lehman Brady Professor Allan Gurganus, by Christopher Sims. Second CDS director Tom Rankin, by Tory Jeffay. FOURTH ROW: 2006–07 Lehman Brady Professor Karen Michel, by Charles Thompson. By Dona Ann McAdams, winner of the 2002 Lange-Taylor Prize with Brad Kessler. By Jim Lommasson, winner of the 2004 Lange-Taylor Prize with Katherine Dunn. By Sascha Pflaeging from the 2012 CDS exhibit When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans. By Bruce Jackson from his 2012 CDS/UNC Press book, In This Timeless Time: Living & Dying on Death Row in America. BOTTOM ROW: 2004 Lehman Brady Professor John Cohen, by Christopher Sims. 2005–06 Lehman Brady Professor Natasha Trethewey, by Nancy Jacobs. 2010 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography judge William Eggleston, by Joanna Welborn. Two-time (2010, 2014) Lehman Brady Professor Mike Wiley, by Steve Exum. By John Moses from the 1997 CDS book The Youngest Parents (Robert Coles) and the 1998 CDS exhibit The Youngest Parents: Photographs by Jocelyn Lee and John Moses.

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WRITING EXPANDING THE ESTABLISHMENT Writers Series Celebrates New Voices

By CDS Writer-in-Residence Duncan Murrell

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n the world of writing and publishing, it’s common for the best-known, most recognized authors to be invited to universities for a couple of days to read and talk with students in exchange for first-class accommodations, promotion, and generous honoraria. A consequence of this steady procession of writers who are already members of the literary establishment is that, for students at least, it creates a fairly circumscribed contemporary canon: These are the writers you should be reading.

This past fall some of us at Duke University—specifically, at the Center for Documentary Studies and the Kenan Institute for Ethics—decided that lesser-known writers of note should also be brought to campus, treated just as grandly, and presented to students as representatives of a more inclusive, less-established establishment.

The Kenan–CDS Visiting Writers Series in Ethics, Society, and Documentary Art—funded generously by CDS, Kenan, and nine campus partners—is intended to give new, unique, and diverse voices in nonfiction literature the wider airing they deserve. Our first writer, Eula Biss, author of On Immunity, is a small-press author and one of the leaders of a renaissance in American essays. During her visit to campus in November, she conducted seminars over lunch with students and a book club with university staff; sat on a faculty panel examining the intersection of metaphor, illness, and art; and gave a fantastic public reading in front of a packed crowd. In the spring we will host Leslie Jamison, author of the critically acclaimed essay collection The Empathy Exams. Both women are young and fearless writers tackling the most difficult subjects, be it disease and our obligations to one another beyond our own survival, or the challenge of practicing radical empathy for one another while living our way through violence, fear, insecurity, and injustice.

It seems fitting in this twenty-fifth year of the Center for Documentary Studies that we have formalized a writers series around an attitude that has for many years animated CDS’s work with authors and the literature of documentary writing. From the support the Lange-Taylor Prize gave to C.D. Wright while she was writing her landmark series of documentary poems on Louisiana prisons, to the recognition of Natasha Trethewey’s documentary work as a poet and essayist, to the parade of fantastic writers published years ago in DoubleTake magazine, CDS has gone out

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of its way to expand the universe of documentary writing and to recognize those writers carrying it forward.

Meanwhile, the writing program at CDS has grown in formal and informal ways. This year we will offer a record number of writing courses through our Continuing Education program, each taught by some of the best writers and teachers in North Carolina and beyond, and we’ll be expanding our use of online classes for students across the country and the world.

Our undergraduate and graduate writing courses continue to be popular with students, for instance our Documentary Publishing course, which produces a new showcase of student work—Vanishing Point, an online magazine of documentary arts (vanishingpointmag.com). Many of our students have gone on to writing careers at such places as Mother Jones, The Wall Street Journal, The National Journal, The Nation, and Grantland, while others are attending some of the finest MFA writing programs in the country. And as Duke’s MFA program is in Experimental and Documentary Arts, I’m working with a number of those grad students as they expand their art practice to include writing.

The writing program thrives as we head into CDS’s future, thanks to the far-sightedness of our leaders here and the support of all our colleagues. We hope you’ll come see exactly what we’re talking about this spring, when Leslie Jamison comes to campus as our second Kenan-CDS Visiting Writer on March 18.

Or just stop by and visit; writers always like to talk.

CDS DOCUMENTARY ESSAY PRIZE IN WRITING This award honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years, with a focus on current or recently completed work from a long-term project. The 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prize will be for documentary writing. The winner of the competition will receive $3,000 and have his or her work featured in Document as well as on the CDS website.

The submissions deadline for the 2015 CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Writing is February 15, 2015.

ocumentarystudies.duke.edu > Awards > CDS y dDocumentary Essay Prize

ABOVE: A mural on the Duke Graffitti Wall publicizing Eula Biss’s reading.

Photograph by Duncan Murrell.

FROM THE WORLD TO LYNN Stories of Immigration

PICTURING AFGHANISTAN

Porch and University Galleries | Through April 13, 2015

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uke University alum (’12) Andrea Patiño Contreras was nineteen years old when she arrived here from Colombia. “‘The magnitude of the immigration phenomenon in the United States’ took her by surprise,” she’s quoted as saying in a story in the New Yorker blog Photo Booth. It’s a phenomenon that has continued to fascinate her, and one she mines in this multimedia exhibit exploring Lynn, Massachusetts, a hub of refugee resettlement where Contreras worked during her time as a CDS Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow. Composed of black-and-white photographs, audio oral histories, and an interactive website, From the World to Lynn is a project that Contreras undertook to help her better understand the community, where almost 30 percent of the population of 90,000 is foreign-born. Every year people from all over the world arrive in this small post-industrial city in the Northeast—Cambodians, Bhutanese, and most recently, Iraqis have come looking for better lives, just like thousands of Europeans did decades before them.

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As American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, exhibits by renowned conflict photographer Lynsey Addario and filmmaker James Longley use smaller figurative lenses to portray broader realities within a country in turmoil for decades.

Kabul, Afghanistan Power Plant Gallery, American Tobacco Campus Through February 20, 2015 | Closing Event 5–8 p.m.

In Kabul, Afghanistan, James Longley uses panoramas to break free of the limitations of a single photo’s frame, which, he says, “hardly do the place justice.” That place is Jada-eMaiwand, a neighborhood in old Kabul that was devastated during Afghanistan’s civil war. Twenty years later it is only partially rebuilt: “Mud-brick homes flank open sewers . . . and winding alleyways reveal blacksmiths, corner grocers, bolani mongers, and bakers impaling warm fish-shaped loaves on nails above their shop windows.” Related programming includes screenings of Longley’s award-winning films.

The Power Plant Gallery is a joint initiative of CDS and Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts.

y powerplantgallery.org/kabul-afghanistan Veiled Rebellion: Women in Afghanistan Juanita Kreps Gallery at CDS | February 9–April 15, 2015

TOP: From Veiled Rebellion: Women in Afghanistan. Photograph by Lynsey Addario. The exhibit is presented in partnership with Project&, an arts entity focused on cultural production with social impact; projectand.org.

ABOVE: From From the World to Lynn: Stories of Immigration. Photograph

by Andrea Patiño Contreras. RIGHT: Installation shot of Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph by Tracy Fish.

Since her first trip to Afghanistan in 2000 to document the lives of women under the Taliban, MacArthur Fellow Lynsey Addario has returned many times, always training a close eye on women’s lives in all areas of Afghan society: culture, politics, education, employment, and domestic life. Much has changed—the same stadium where the Taliban performed public executions now hosts events for both sexes—but Afghanistan remains a country where it is extremely difficult to photograph women because of cultural and societal taboos. Most need permission from a male relative. The body of work in Veiled Rebellion is the result of Addario’s 2009 commission by National Geographic for a comprehensive photo essay depicting the many facets of women’s lives in Afghanistan. Addario’s new book, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, will be out on February 5, 2015.

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Summer block party, South Side, Chicago, 2009. Photograph by Jon Lowenstein.

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JON LOWENSTEIN

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he Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize has been part of the Center for Documentary Studies from the beginning, established in 1990 to encourage artistic collaboration in the tradition of acclaimed photographer Lange and writer and social scientist Taylor. The prize now supports documentary artists, working alone or in teams, whose extended fieldwork projects rely on the interplay of words and images.

This past fall, a CDS selection committee chose Jon Lowenstein to win the 2014 Lange-Taylor Prize for South Side, his project about the Chicago neighborhood where he has lived and worked for over a decade—a place where, he writes, “I have witnessed the systematic and ongoing deconstruction and undermining of communities and the ensuing fight to maintain a semblance of order while those neighborhoods crumble in front of our eyes.” With the South Side project, he hopes to create “a lasting testimony . . . to the legacy of segregation, the impact of vast wealth inequality, and how de-industrialization and globalization play out on the ground in Chicago.”

South Side combines black-and-white photographs, video, personal narrative writing and poetry, oral histories, and the collection of found ephemera “in an effort to stitch this story together and trace the space between post-industrial meltdown and repackaged, ‘gentrified’ city.” With the award, Lowenstein will continue his fieldwork, which includes geo-tagging and mapping his photographs with Instagram (follow him @jonlowenstein), as well as continue to write and make short experimental films, in hopes of “weaving together the disparate strands” of the project to “shed light on where we are at not only in Chicago but in the United States at this vital moment in our nation’s history.”

With the prize, Lowenstein wins $10,000 and a solo show at CDS. A multimedia exhibition of South Side— photographs, texts, and video­­—will open at the Center for Documentary Studies in fall 2015.

To view excerpts from Jon Lowenstein’s prizewinning submission and to learn more about the documentarystudies.duke.edu > Awards > Lange-Taylor 2015 Lange-Taylor Prize competition

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LET’S TALK CDS RADIO

CDS Radio Past and {BC: or &} Present

By CDS Audio Director John Biewen

A book of essays by today’s best audio-documentary practitioners edited by John Biewen and coedited

by CDS publishing and awards director Alexa Dilworth is now in its fifth printing. Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound was originally published in 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press and the Center for Documentary Studies as part of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.

I’d moved to Durham, and the Center had agreed to take me in, “in residence,” loosely speaking, though I was working fulltime as a correspondent/producer for American RadioWorks (ARW), the documentary unit of American Public Media. The Center provided office space and I tried to be of occasional use as Elana got the audio program off the ground. In 2002 and 2003 we coproduced the joint ARW/CDS radio documentaries “Days of Infamy: December 7 and 9/11” and “Korea: The Unfinished War.” When Elana left CDS, the audio program fell to me—first on a part-time, shared basis as I continued to work for American RadioWorks, and then, in 2006, full-time. By then, the basic structure of the CDS audio program as it exists today was in place.

We offer an undergraduate audio course each semester (also available to grad students); we teach a couple of week-long summer institutes that draw students from across the country and beyond, as well as Continuing Education classes taught by other radio folk in the area; and we’re a production house that makes CDS Radio projects for national and international audiences.

The current multi-year project, Contested: Sports and Society, may appear on its face to be something of a departure, both for CDS and for me. Part of CDS’s core mission is to “amplify voices, advance human dignity, engender respect among individuals, break down barriers to understanding, and illuminate social injustices.” Much of our radio work has focused directly on the sorts of themes such a mission statement would suggest: race and class, local democratic action, the lives of Latino immigrants and family farmers, an overlooked history of stolen Native American lands. Sports?

Underlying the Contested project, though, is our belief that sport is a rich vein in which to find stories of unity and division, identity, inequality, and the American Dream. The first major iteration of Contested, a one-hour episode for the NPR program State of the Re:Union, told Durham, North Carolina–based stories about young athletes and their families and the fault lines (race, class, gender) that are laid bare, sometimes mended, and sometimes exacerbated in the world of youth sports.

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the work on Contested continues. The first in an occasional series aired on NPR’s All Things Considered in October 2014: A look at the failure of a Cardinals playoff run to unite the St. Louis area in the face of the police shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

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By CDS Audio Director John Biewen

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hese days at the Center for Documentary Studies, it’s routine for people to talk about the four mediums in which we teach, present, and produce: photography, film/video, writing, and audio. We have four banners on the front porch, each trumpeting one of those mediums. (Increasingly, you’ll hear people evoke a fifth medium, or mode: multimedia in its many forms.)

Audio has not always had that kind of stature at CDS. For its first decade or so, the Center celebrated the visual image and the printed word. Cofounded by photographer Alex Harris (who had led CDS’s precursor, the Center for Documentary Photography), CDS was grounded in photo from the start. Nonfiction writing also held a prominent place, for example through the Lange-Taylor Prize for collaborating writers and photographers, and in DoubleTake magazine, which started publication in 1995. The DoubleTake Film Festival was born in 1998, later to become the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Audio did happen at CDS in the early years. Staff and students would lug recorders out into the world, usually to capture interviews for use in text-based oral history projects. But it took awhile for audio to get full billing as a documentary medium of its own at CDS. In 2001, under then-director Tom Rankin, Elana Hadler Perl became the Center’s first “Documentary Radio Programs Director.” Having spent three years managing the Center’s ambitious multimedia Indivisible project, Elana, a former NPR staffer, was charged with creating an expanded audio program at CDS. What would that look (or sound) like? Elana was feeling her way into that question when I turned up.

REALITY RADIO

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Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org

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FILM FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL Four Days and Then Some

By Lindsay Gordon-Faranda Full Frame Communications Manager

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ur staff is excited to be gearing up for the eighteenth annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, April 9–12, when nearly a hundred documentary films from all over the world and more than twelve thousand patrons will converge on two city blocks in downtown Durham (providing a huge boost to the local economy in the process—nearly $2.5 million in 2014).

Full Frame—a qualifying festival in the Documentary Short Subject category of the Academy Awards® and a qualifying event for the Producers Guild of America Awards—is known for its friendly, supportive vibe. Interaction and conversation among filmmakers, subjects, and audiences is a hallmark, whether informally at post-screening Q&As or at our A&E Speakeasy panels with documentary industry insiders. Besides the work of established filmmakers, Full Frame showcases works-in-progress by first-time documentarians as part of the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant; past Garrett Scott projects include The 12 O’Clock Boys, In Country, 1971, and (T)error, which is premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

While most people know Full Frame for the festival, we’re much more than a four-day event. Full Frame was included in MovieMaker magazine’s 2014 list of the 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World in no small part because of our year-round programming. As the magazine attests, “the very best [festivals] elevate their communities throughout the year,” as we do with yearround screenings, free and open to the public, and educational programs (see “The Next Generation”) that further our mission to bring documentary film to the Durham and wider Triangle communities, building new audiences for nonfiction cinema.

Free screenings in the 100-seat Full Frame Theater at the American Tobacco Campus are part of the Full Frame Road Show Presented by PNC. With PNC’s support we’ve expanded our free offerings beyond Durham, including Cary and Chapel Hill in 2014, a year that also saw us partnering with the Downtown Raleigh Alliance and the Durham Pride Festival on free outdoor screenings. Our much-loved Winter Series brings documentaries with Oscar buzz to Fletcher Hall at the historic Carolina Theatre in Durham. Speaking of Oscar buzz, at the time of this writing our Best Short at the 2014 festival, J. Christian Jensen’s White Earth, was shortlisted for an Academy Award®, as were

several features that included Full Frame Films and films made by previous Full Frame directors—The Case Against 8, Citizen Koch, Last Days in Vietnam, The Overnighters, Citizenfour, and Life Itself—the latter two films directed by Full Frame advisory board member Laura Poitras and 2014 Full Frame Tribute recipient Steve James, respectively.

We at Full Frame believe that documentary film can change lives, and we’re proud to strive for and prove that every month of the year, not just during four amazing days in April.

Passes for the 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival go on sale February 11; individual tickets go on sale April 2. See the Full Frame website for more information. The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is a program of the Center for Documentary Studies.

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THE NEXT GENERATION The School of Doc, Full Frame’s free five-week summer camp program, introduces Durham public high school students to the professional tools and practices of documentary filmmaking. During the program’s fourth year this past summer, twelve students and three student interns created their own short films about Durham icon Pauli Murray and CAARE, Inc., a Durham nonprofit. Their films premiered to a packed house at the Full Frame Theater, and the students are excited to screen their works at the 2015 festival. The Teach the Teachers program instructs Durham public school teachers on incorporating documentary film into their curricula. In 2014, six teachers attended workshops as well as the festival. Teach the Teacher alumni create study guides for films in the new Full Frame Library housed at the School for Creative Studies, accessible to all Durham public school teachers.

The library currently includes twenty films that have screened at past Full Frame festivals.

ABOVE: Outside at the 2014 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Photograph by Kallyn Boerner. OPPOSITE: Brothers Geonnie Brodie and Jalanie Taylor, members of a Pop Warner football team in Durham, North Carolina.

Video still by Hannah Colton from the Contested project.

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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Felsman Fellows Program MFA | EDA Grads Raise Awareness on Children’s Issues Arriving at the gate of the camp changed a lot of things in my life. From that moment I just felt like a different person.

From a simple normal girl, to a girl with dreams who would like to achieve her goals. I had confidence I am going to change. And for real, I did change. I am another kind of girl: a courageous girl. ­— KHALDIYA, 17 YEARS OLD How does it feel to be a Syrian girl in Jordan who is living in the world’s second largest refugee camp, Za’atari? Hundreds of journalists have visited Za’atari, but what would Syrian girls tell us about their own lives if given the opportunity to make photographs and videos of life in the camp?

Those are questions posed by Laura Doggett, a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts program (MFA | EDA) at Duke. In 2014, Laura created a media workshop for Syrian girls at Za’atari under the auspices of the J. Kirk Felsman Program on Children in Adversity based at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Laura and fellow MFA|EDA graduate Braxton Hood—who created her own media workshop for Syrian refugee girls in Turkey—each worked closely with a recent Masters of Public Policy graduate to combine documentary and policy analysis focused on young women’s lives in the camps and urban settings.

This model—combining in-depth documentary work with policy analysis on issues affecting children—is at the heart of the Felsman Fellows Program, created in the memory of Dr. Kirk Felsman, a clinical child psychologist who taught at CDS and Sanford. Felsman worked for over thirty years around the world with street children, child soldiers, refugees, immigrants, and children affected by HIV-AIDS, wars, and natural disasters.

The program matches graduates of the MFA|EDA program and the Masters of Public Policy program at the Sanford School with international organizations committed to the care and protection of vulnerable children and youth. Each Fellowship culminates in an opportunity to showcase research and documentary work in Washington, D.C. The program also creates a strong social media presence around the Fellows’ work to raise awareness and advocate for innovative global policy on issues affecting vulnerable children and youth.

Currently, MFA | EDA grads Elizabeth Landesberg and Sarah Garrahan are documenting child protection and labor issues as Felsman Fellows in Peru and Brazil alongside public policy graduates Lauren Beaudry and Stephanie Reist. Their work with

Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org

the Felsman Program in South America is funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation with additional support from Marilyn and Richard Preyer.

—Alex Harris, MFA | EDA instructor and Duke Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies View photos and videos from Felsman Fellowships felsmanfellowship.weebly.com

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Undergraduate Education New Fellowships Foster Professional Mentoring The Center for Documentary Studies is pleased to launch a new initiative for Duke University undergraduates this semester, when the first Research in Practice Program (RIPP) Fellowships in the Documentary Arts will be awarded. The mentoring and professional practices program is an independent studies arrangement that strengthens bonds between students and CDS faculty and builds in more time for projects to mature outside the confines of a regular course. Faculty will guide the Fellows in conceiving of and implementing the most appropriate outcome for a final documentary project on social issues—a film, photo exhibit, website, audio recording, or magazine-length article are among many possible options. Fellows will present their projects to the public at the end of the semester.

“The RIPP Fellowships in the Documentary Arts add a new dimension to our undergraduate teaching and research program,” says Christopher Sims, undergraduate education director at CDS. “By supporting some of our most engaged students, the fellowships will directly impact the production of well-crafted and deeply observed documentary work. This initiative will push students to think how and where their work can travel off-campus in a finished form, where it can engage audiences, spark conversations, and make lasting impressions.”

Applicants must have completed at least one Documentary Studies course and undertaken an intensive period of documentary fieldwork through opportunities at CDS and Duke. For more information on the RIPP Fellowships and other student opportunities, see “Undergraduate Awards and Fellowships” on the CDS Undergraduate Education webpage.

y documentarystudies.duke.edu > Classes ABOVE: Video still from Children, a film by Marah, a Syrian girl in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan. OPPOSITE: High school student Asia Bridges models a headpiece for her flag team, which will march in over a dozen parades during Mardi Gras. Photograph by Distance Certificate student Lindsey Phillips.

Continuing Education Expanding Options Open Virtual Doors to CDS

For more information on the Distance Certificate, and to register for on-site and online spring classes and summer institutes: cdscourses.org

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“We started out offering just a few online classes to see how that would work,” says program director April Walton, of CDS Continuing Education’s initial foray into digital classrooms in 2010. “The technology has improved so dramatically since then, we now feel like our classes can be meaningful through a virtual platform,” says Walton. At present, there are about a dozen online options each semester, with plans for more. “I’ve heard hesitation from people about online classes,” says student Lindsey Phillips, an aspiring filmmaker based in New Orleans, “but this is a really easy system. . . . Each class I’ve taken, the instructors have all been great about giving us time to talk and have feedback sessions with them, so it doesn’t feel like you’re missing out on being in a classroom.”

Continuing Education’s online classes have become an increasingly common entry point for students who go on to enroll in the CDS Distance Certificate program, a special curriculum launched two years ago that allows out-of-town students to complete the requirements for a Certificate in Documentary Arts, a structured sequence of courses that culminates with the completion of a final documentary project.

“The demand started with people who’ve come through our summer institutes,” says Walton, speaking of the annual weeklong institutes in audio, photography, video, and writing that draw a majority of students from outside North Carolina. “Every class you take earns credits toward the certificate whether you’re signed up for the program or not. So we had this whole group of people who were asking for a way to complete the requirements.”

Walton modeled the Distance Certificate on low-residency masters’ degrees, in which students are required to come to campus periodically. “We do want people to have a connection here, and feel a sense of belonging here,” she says. Thus the DocuArts Retreat, which takes place in Durham each winter, and which Walton describes as “a very intensive, long-weekend, once-a-year forum for distance students to share the work they’ve done, build a community within their group, and make some substantial progress toward their final project.”

Distance Certificate students also select from a set of elective summer institutes, weekend workshops, and online classes, which are never canned lectures; the goal is to simulate the in-person classroom experience via videoconference, with interaction further facilitated by a class-specific blog.

Lindsey Phillips is set to be among the Distance Certificate program’s first graduates. She wanted training in directing, in-

terviewing, and story structure to add to her background in digital media production but didn’t want to relocate for grad school.

That’s when she discovered CDS and its Continuing Education program via Google. The classes she’s taken as a distance student have given her the tools to undertake her documentary on the costumers who supply New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes. As Phillips says, “I’ve learned how to have a game plan, essentially.

How to sit down and put a system in place, and how to move forward.”

—Marc Maximov, CDS Continuing Education Coordinator

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PHOTOGRAPHY Ambitious Yearlong Project Aims for the Unconventional

What don’t we know about you and Duke? The Center for Documentary Studies and Duke Photography are asking that question with Document Duke 360°. The yearlong photo Document challenge invites members of the extended university community to break out of the familiar to create an original, crowdsourced view of what’s distinct, poignant, complicated, iconic, eccentric, engaging, inspiring, and uncomfortable about Duke. By the end of 2015 we hope to have created, collectively, a new and unconventional portrait of who we are—a 360-degree view captured in 365 evocative and provocative images that speak to the many worlds that are lived and experienced at Duke University.

One photo a day, chosen by CDS and Duke Photography staff, will be featured on the project website, Instagram feed, and other Duke University digital and social media outlets. From those winning photos, guest curators will also choose a photo of the month. So let’s Duke it out. Between now and December 31, give us your best shots. Any format in any style is welcome.

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@documentduke360

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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