DOCUMENTFALL 2014 | THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

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DOCUMENT® 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. HoganAssociate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnightPublishing Director: Alexa DilworthArt Director: Bonnie CampbellCommunications Director and Document Editor: Elizabeth PhillipsWeb Design and Production Manager: Whitney Baker

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 injus-tices. 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.

CONTENTSFROM THE CENTER 3A Letter from CDS Director Wesley Hogan

FEATURED 4Interview with Filmmaker Marco WilliamsProminent Documentarian Is 2014–15 Lehman Brady Professor at Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill

EXHIBITIONS 6Hard Art, DC 1979Photographs of a Punk Scene by Lucian Perkins

City Under One RoofJen Kinney’s 2013 Lange-Taylor Prizewinning Project

AWARDS 8–92014 CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Photography Iveta Vaivode’s Imagined Family Memories

FRESH DOCS 10A Collaboration with the Southern Documentary Fund

EDUCATION 11–14Undergraduate Education2014 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award Winners

MFA in Experimental and Documentary ArtsIntroducing the Class of 2016

Continuing EducationSpring 2014 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates

New Fall Classes

Student Video and Audio Docs

OTHER NEWS 15CDS Summer Superstars Kelvin Carter and Tria Smothers

Audio Under the Stars

FALL 2014

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COVER: Pilcene, Latvia, 2013. Photograph from “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path” by Iveta Vaivode, winner of the 2014 CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Photography.LEFT: Still from Two Towns of Jasper, directed by Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, 2014–15 Lehman Brady Professor. MIDDLE: Filmmaker Laura Poitras, Berlin, Germany, 2012. Photograph by Sean Gallup for Home Front Communications. RIGHT: Still from 27 Months, directed by Ashley Tindall and screening as part of Fresh Docs. OPPOSITE, LEFT: CDS director Wesley Hogan. Photograph by Christopher Sims. MIDDLE: Bad Brains frontman H.R., from the exhibition Hard Art, DC 1979. Photograph by Lucian Perkins. RIGHT: Still from The Undocumented, directed by Marco Williams.

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bring a lot of joy each year, but as mom always said, paraphrasing that famous old dictum, “Fam-ily guests are like fish, they begin to smell after three days.” Since a three-day trip to Berlin isn’t

very practical, between the raucously fun family meals and celebrations of our extended visits, we go see a lot of mov-ies. A lot of movies. It gives all of us a break.

In 2006 during one such trip I saw The Lives of Others. The film fascinated me—so much so that I stayed in the theater to watch it again. Though it’s not a documentary, it began to fundamentally reshape my thinking about the process of making documentary work. Tracing the story of Gerd Wiesler, a 1980s East German Stasi officer who spies on the lives of others by listening to surveillance tapes from a wiretapped apartment, the film raised for me a central question: in what circumstances does documenting some-one’s life do harm? I realized belatedly, despite my long experience as a historian working with government papers, that the question of who in government gets to authenti-cate documents is a critical form of curating history. Out of the whole vast sea of a life or lives, the notion that a gov-ernment or someone in government—or a documentarian—is plucking perhaps random drops out to paint a portrait of “truth” stopped me cold.

My exploration of these questions intensified after see-ing Laura Poitras’ 2012 short film The Program about Wil-liam Binney. Binney, an intelligence official at the National Security Agency for thirty-plus years, resigned in protest after a program he had developed to analyze Soviet intel-ligence was mobilized, post-9/11, to capture and docu-ment—in a huge electronic facility in Utah—millions of American citizens’ communications without warrant. If you or I emerge as a “person of interest” to the government, this trove of data can then be mined to create a picture of who we are and have been. As Binney said last year of the NSA’s expanded post-9/11 surveillance: “It’s better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had.”

CDS’s approach to documentary over the last twenty-five years in some ways comes at this from the opposite direc-tion: we embrace transparency and accountability as cen-tral to how we teach, exhibit, and make documentary work. Yet the deeper questions raised by The Lives of Others and William Binney’s resignation resonate throughout this issue of Document. For example, who do we trust enough to doc-ument our own country’s devastating history of race? We’re thrilled to have filmmaker Marco Williams join CDS and the broader Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill communities as this year’s Lehman Brady Professor. In the course he’s teaching this fall, Documenting Personal Narrative, Williams explores the relationship between the personal and the communal through first-person narrative in documentary film, an ap-proach he has used in the past and is returning to with his current project. In his words, “To do something that’s more

explicitly in the first-person vernacular is to take on all the responsibilities, all the considerations, and all the ethics that go with being a documentary filmmaker.” It is this power that draws people into a Williams film, first-person or not: one follows his lead because he is honest about who he is. And so when he tells us why whites drove blacks out of towns in Texas, Missouri, and Georgia, or why James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death behind a truck in 1998, we trust him.

We’re experimenting at CDS with how we teach newer documentarians to build this kind of trust with their sub-jects and with audiences. We don’t want them to feel like William Binney or the fictional Wiesler, who once they “own” their role in revealing facets of the lives of others, resign for fear of how that exposure will impact fellow citi-zens. So it inspires me to see the careful steps that Lange-Taylor Prize winner Jen Kinney takes to build trust with those she documents in Whittier, Alaska. And the vision-ary moves of CDS faculty and staff members to co-create documentary happenings through our Continuing Education program’s partnership with Durham neighborhoods during the video and audio summer institutes. Or the exciting mul-tiplicity of voices that one can hear as important to Dur-ham’s collective story via the Audio Under the Stars series.

Once an audience is clear on who is doing the document-ing and why, the documentary form’s openness to new ap-proaches can become visionary. CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Photography winner Iveta Vaivode’s meditation on the “ambivalence of photographs, their possibilities and limitations,” leads her to explore the idea that “we should not trust images as records of our lives and histories.” And yet the subtle, tantalizing landscapes of family and com-munity evoked in her essay, “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path,” make one want to learn more, not less, about her “documents” of home. Similarly, the open, experimental approach to curating that CDS exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton describes in her story about the Hard Art exhibit invites a wealth of new knowledge into the Center: she shares the inventive process by which she came to discover “how punk—seeing people who were so different—empow-ered them to be who they’d been afraid to be: themselves.” And the Fresh Docs program, a CDS partnership with the Southern Documentary Fund, takes this exploration public: filmmakers screen a work-in-progress, and both the audi-ence and SDF director Rachel Raney respond with gusto, enthusiasm, and creativity, “rolling up their sleeves and re-ally digging into what is working and what is not working,” she says.

So join me in exploring this lesser-known, critical facet of CDS’s creative hothouse: the care these documentarians take with the stories of others—and the carefulness with which they explore their own roles in these tales.

Enjoy a video commemorating CDS’s twenty-fifth anniversary, which we’ll be celebrating during the year beginning this fall:

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BY CDS DIRECTOR WESLEY HOGAN

FEATUREDInterview with Filmmaker Marco Williams

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University is honored to bring acclaimed filmmaker and film educator Marco Williams to the Duke and University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill cam-puses as the 2014–15 Lehman Brady Visiting

Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies. CDS coordinates the cross-campus collaboration, which brings distinguished practitioners and scholars of the documentary arts to both schools to teach and participate in other events open to students and the general public. “We are elated to have this giant of the documentary world as part of our community for the coming academic year,” said Lehman Brady Committee chair Charlie Thompson, a core faculty member at CDS and professor of the practice of cul-tural anthropology at Duke.

Over the course of his long, award-winning filmmaking career, the 2014 Guggenheim Fellow’s “recurrent canvas has been the lingering residue of slavery in America—race rela-tions,” Williams wrote in his Guggenheim artist’s statement. “I try to tell the stories we’d rather not tell.” A professor in the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Williams taught at the North Carolina School of the Arts in the 1990s and is a longtime participant at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival as a filmmaker, panelist, and juror.

In the following interview, Williams talks with Full Frame programming coordinator Emma Miller about his career and upcoming tenure as Lehman Brady Professor.

Emma Miller: As the Lehman Brady Professor, you’ll be teaching a class in the fall about using personal narrative in documentary film, an approach that has played a role in your own work: one of your earliest films, In Search of Our Fathers, is an intimate look at your family, and your current project is a return to personal filmmaking—you’ll again be drawing on your family history to examine the larger issue of black-on-black murder. What has drawn you to this first-person approach?

Marco Williams: I think that a filmmaker benefits by owning his first-person voice and recognizing it. To have your first-person voice manifest in your film leads to the direct knowl-edge that you have a point of view. Now, that point of view, that voice, can be muted, it can be veiled, it can be overt. But to do something that’s more explicitly in the first-person vernacular is to take on all the responsibilities, all the consid-erations, and all the ethics that go with being a documentary filmmaker. As far as my own work, certainly In Search of Our Fathers is a very explicit first-person narrative documentary. I’ve also appeared in Banished and MLK Boulevard, but it’s In Search of Our Fathers in which I fully own that this story on the screen, this story that I am witnessing, this story that I am investigating, this story that I’m documenting—it involves and includes me.

With my current project about black-on-black murder,

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there are lots of ways to look at that. I could look at it in a much more distant fashion. I could examine other people’s stories. But because this phenomenon, if it is such, touches me directly, to use my story and my family as a portal into the larger theme means that I have to own, acknowledge, and be vulnerable to the pain, the shame, the anger, and the systemic realities. So to be the Lehman Brady Professor and teach this class about using personal narratives allows me to walk the walk. I’m not just going to be talking to students about an abstract idea or something that I’ve given thought to, it’s something that I’ll be exploring myself at the same time in my own work.

You tackle issues of race very directly in your films. What makes documentary film a particularly successful medium for exploring those issues and contributing to our under-standing of race, history, and our American identity?

I think there are several ways that documentary has allowed me to investigate, interrogate, and reflect on race in America and how we as Americans locate this most complicated com-ponent of our identity. Documentary has allowed me to give voice to all parties. It has allowed me to show the impact of race at its most heinous—the murder of James Byrd Jr. [Two Towns of Jasper], the violence of Freedom Summer in Mississippi [Freedom Summer]. It has allowed me both to confront and be confrontational without antagonism. I think documentary film also gives an opportunity for those who are struggling with or confronting these issues to speak for themselves and come alive in a way that literature or journal-ism don’t always enable as successfully.

For the past sixteen years, you’ve taught at New York Uni-versity. How do you think that leaving New York City and spending a year in the South will impact you as an educator and a filmmaker?I spent four years teaching at the North Carolina School of the Arts in the 1990s, and I’m very much looking forward to returning to North Carolina. I’m looking forward to the inti-macy here, both in terms of the scale of the communities I’ll be teaching in and the intimacy that I think characterizes the South. There are certain modicums of behavior—“Yes, ma’am,” “No, sir”—that you don’t get in the North, and you certainly don’t get in New York City. I expect that intimate environment—where it’s a little slower paced, a little more familiar, a little more welcoming—will reinvigorate my own work. I’m also looking forward to the chance to engage students who are not all explicitly filmmakers or aspiring film-makers. As opposed to students at a production school like NYU, these are students who come from a diverse course of study, and I think that is going to be great and challenging for me as an educator.

In the decades since you first started making films as an undergraduate at Harvard, how do you think that your work has evolved or, perhaps, stayed the same?

Well, I certainly don’t think of myself as a beginner any lon-ger, although I think that there’s still much for me to learn. But I would say that in many, many ways, being the Lehman Brady Professor and teaching the Documenting Personal Nar-rative course in the fall brings me back to my undergraduate beginnings, when I was first introduced to and learned the value of first-person narrative. So in some sense, as I look back on my career and my investment in filmmaking, I feel like I’ve both evolved quite a lot, and I’m sort of the same—I still hold on to many of the values and aspirations that I had when I was first learning filmmaking. At the risk of sounding arrogant, those aims were to have a chance to make a differ-ence and, in no small way, to have a chance to change the D

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had the opportunity to try to fulfill those aspirations by making films, but now, having taught for twenty years, I’ve also had the opportunity to try to do that by virtue of teaching and sharing what I know.

What has drawn you to the subjects that you’ve cho-sen to explore in your films? Do you choose a theme or issue in advance and then find a story and characters to focus on, or does the process evolve more organi-cally than that?

I’d say there’s a little bit of both in terms of what I’ve ended up making films about. With The Undocumented, I felt in my heart that a film about immigration was what I wanted to do. I just felt it; it felt right at the time. I consider immigration to be the civil rights issue of the early twenty-first century. So I look sometimes for a topic that I’m really drawn to, and then I look for a character and a story to tell. I think of documentary as being about storytelling, and I think that all of my work is framed around narrative principles. And so, case in point, with the current project I’m developing about black-on-black violence, while I know I want to make use of my own story, I also know that I don’t want it just to be my own story. I have a sense of how I’d like to frame the larger film, and now I’m looking for sto-ries or individual characters that might represent that larger idea I want to explore. And then, of course, even with the films that I’ve been invited or commissioned to make, I’m still looking for characters and a story to tell as I try to address the particular theme or thesis.

Are there certain issues or topics that you think docu-mentarians should be addressing going forward—cru-cial stories that need to be told?

The beautiful thing about documentary these days is that there are many of us telling these stories and trying to make these films. And so I guess the short answer is no. I think everything is being told, and in a lot of ways we can learn or discover so much about the world we live in through the documentarian and the documentarian’s lens. So I wouldn’t say to you, “Oh, that’s a film that somebody should be making. How come that’s not being made?” More often than not I’m coming to the realization, “Wow, I didn’t know anything about that. Thank goodness for that documentary.”

I think if I had a caveat to all of it, it would really be in relationship to the gatekeepers. I do have concerns or frustrations that, by and large, there’s a small cadre of people who fund documentarians, and as a result, to some extent the films that are getting made and the subject matters that are being presented don’t really

reflect the filmmaker’s voice; they reflect the taste and the bias of the funder. And that’s rarely acknowledged, although I think there’s been some conversation about this of late. By extension, this is also true at the other end of the gatekeeping: what’s being broadcast, and what’s being exhibited at film festivals. So I have a suspicion that there are lots of stories on lots of top-ics that are being made by people that are not getting seen because a set of gatekeepers has not deemed them to be worthy. And what they are using as their value matrix is whether or not the filmmaker can “make it”—are they skilled, are they experienced? And ditto with the festival directors who are preoccupied, rightful-ly so, with the question of whether there’s an audience for a film: “I’m trying to program this, yet does it cater to too selective an audience?”

Let me add one last sort of cause for concern: I cannot help myself, maybe because it relates to my particular concerns in society, but I am constantly agitated, whenever there are announcements regard-ing films and filmmakers and their achievements and who’s on panels, by how few non-white filmmakers are being presented. Now, there may only be a few of us, but I think that means we should be more omnipres-ent so that we can be role models for those non-white filmmakers who are coming up. And so, if I had a kind of subversive answer to your question, it’s that I’d like to see a greater diversity of filmmakers being anointed and getting a chance to tell their stories.

What advice would you give to aspiring documentar-ians who might not have the opportunity to take a course with you or spend time with you while you’re here?

I would say to start with two mantras: have curiosity, and have courage. And then I would encourage young filmmakers to avoid the notion that simply interview-ing someone makes for a documentary. Be willing to engage the world by observing it, and then consider engagement through verbal interaction. Anybody, to a certain extent, can make a documentary, but my wish for those who aspire to make documentaries is not to immediately pick up a camera and ask people ques-tions. Documentary can show and it can illuminate; don’t rely on just having things explained or told.

For more information on the Lehman Brady Professor-ship, Marco Williams, and his films:

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Stills from Marco Williams’ most recent film, The Undocumented (2013)

Prominent Documentarian Is the 2014–15 Lehman Brady Visiting Professor

community and values inherent in punk culture saved their lives. When CDS writer-in-residence Duncan Murrell brought the prospectus for the book and traveling exhibition Hard Art, DC 1979 to my attention, I had to let go of the last vestiges of my prejudices against punk. Bad Brains, the band featured in much of this body of work, is composed of four black guys!

In a conference call, Lely Constantinople and Jayme McLel-lan, co-curators of the exhibition, wanted to be very clear that this is not a show about an historic moment, it’s about a move-ment that is alive and thriving, actively threaded to now. We talked about expressions of DIY/punk culture—small, inde-pendent and cooperative record labels, bands, clubs, spaces, collectives, zines, publications, events, farms, what have you.

As an outsider, I’ve been reaching out to colleagues and friends for guidance, help, ideas, and access. They’ve given me books and zines, turned me on to bands, blogs, and films, and some have agreed to write and contribute images to a one-off zine I’d like to make about punk’s influence. So many people have stories about how punk—seeing people who were so dif-ferent—empowered them to be who they’d been afraid to be: themselves. Things I’ve discovered that I’d like to draw atten-tion to and continue to learn from and about while this show is here include, but aren’t limited to, multi-identityism on many fronts, anti-oppression work, and current local expressions of DIY/punk. There’s so much energy bubbling around this.

Officially, there are two exhibit-related events scheduled for September, but in the spirit of the culture there are likely to be some pop-up events as well—screenings, a book swap, maybe some bands . . . stay tuned.

*My twist on a mondegreen of the lyrics for the 1978 Alicia Bridges hit, “I Love the Night Life (Disco Round).”

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Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries Through October 11, 2014Reception and Artists’ Talk with Lucian Perkins and Alec MacKay: September 17, 6–9 p.m.Reception and Curators’ Conversation with Lely Constanti-nople and Jayme McLellan: September 18, 6–9 p.m.

CDS exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton muses on disco, punk, and Hard Art, DC 1979:

I turned twenty-one in 1979, the year that Lucian Perkins be-gan shooting these images of the underground punk scene in D.C. I’d been back in Manhattan for two years (born in Harlem, moved to the Bronx at eight) and was working Monday–Fri-day, 9–5, at a Fortune 500 company in midtown and rehears-ing with a small theater company in the Bowery most nights, diagonally across 3rd Avenue from CBGB. No, I never hung out there. My entire body never broke the threshold, though I poked my head in a couple times when there wasn’t a crowd in the street—I gave the crowd a wide berth. At the time, I felt more commonality with and was less intimidated by the tradi-tional Bowery denizens than that crowd, the punks. “I love[d] the night life, [but] I love[d] to boogie, along the disco HIGH-waaaay!”*

No, I did not see anything in punk for me; too loud, too angry, too destructive, too white, too male, too too! And I can’t dance to that. And skinheads don’t like black people. That’s me, reading the surface. Not necessarily exactly what I thought, but sticky enough stuff to keep me from wanting to look deeply.

Fortunately for me, some of my colleagues are as willing to share their stories as they are interested in the stories of others. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and learn from people who identify as punks, whose worldview comes from a formative experience in punk, who feel that the

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Hard Art, DC 1979 PUNK’S DIY SPIRIT LIVES ON

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City Under One RoofJen Kinney’s Prizewinning Project on Whittier, Alaska

Juanita Kreps Gallery October 27, 2014–January 24, 2015Reception and Artist’s Talk: October 30, 6–9 p.m.

“The City of Whittier is a world entire. The great myth of Alaska—harsh but rewarding, distant, lawless, primal, pris-tine—is alive here, unglorified and unique. From the entrance of the tunnel to the end of an unfinished road, Whittier is only three miles long—just barely longer than the tunnel itself. It can be mapped in fewer than fifteen streets. Hours here have a small town’s drawling density. It is not timeless but time-heavy. Minutes stretch out like mountain ranges, beautiful and fright-ening and impossible to escape. Everyone’s got a tall tale to make them pass. I’ve been told that Whittier was named town with the best-tasting water in the country, two years running. I hear there’s a goldmine across the bay. It’s all true or it’s all false, and all of it matters: how anyone came to live in this un-likely land, how this city of no city came to be.”

—Jen Kinney, from “City Under One Roof”

This solo exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies is part of the twenty-first Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, awarded by CDS in 2013 to American photographer and writer Jen Kinney for “City Under One Roof,” her project on Whittier, Alaska. The prestigious award is given to encourage documen-tary work in the tradition of acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. Relaunched in 2011, the $10,000 annual prize supports documentary art-ists—working alone or in teams—involved in ongoing fieldwork projects that rely on both words and images in their creation and presentation. Winning projects are included in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Library.

Kinney, a 2012 graduate in photography and imaging from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, uses her own photographs—both environmental and human portraits—oral histories of year-round or part-time Whittier residents, historical essays, and archival photographs to explore shared spaces in a town she describes as an “unlikely crossroads of community and solitude, isolation and claustrophobia.” The only land ac-cess to the tiny outpost on Prince William Sound, sixty miles north of Anchorage, is via the longest rail and highway tunnel in North America. Ninety percent of Whittier’s population of just over two hundred people live in one fourteen-story building called Begich Towers. Kinney’s ongoing project looks at “how the structures that people inhabit shape and order their lives; how, in turn, people construct, alter, and destroy spaces; and how these constant renovations to our physical world mir-ror changes in the stories that we tell ourselves, and how we structure our lives to these stories.”

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LEFT AND ABOVE: From the exhibit City Under One Roof. Photographs by Jen Kinney. OPPOSITE: Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains at Madams Organ, from Hard Art, DC 1979. Photograph by Lucian Perkins.

In her photo essay “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path,” Iveta Vaivode seeks to create a new family album, one full of photographs of imagined memories. This unique body of work was chosen by a selec-tion committee at the Center for Documentary Studies to win the 2014 CDS Documentary Essay Prize, a competition that honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years.

Vaivode, a freelance photographer based in Riga, Latvia, writes, “Looking at my parents’ family albums, I would imagine their lives before me. I constructed memories I didn’t have, playing them over and over again. Somehow I always felt that the people I saw in the albums differed from the people I saw next to me every day. These photographs, while connected with a particular family history, triggered my imagina-tion rather than gave me a specific knowledge. . . . “

The ambivalence of photographs, their possibilities and limitations, suggest that we should not trust images as records of our lives and histories. . . . My work addresses the idea of memory and ‘looking back’ through the creation of a narrative based on family history.”

For the last three years, Vaivode has been documenting the people of Pilcene, a remote village in east-ern Latvia (Latgale) where her grandmother and mother were born, to search for stories connected to her family. The rural landscape and the people were quite different than she had expected, transforming her project from “a nostalgic photo album into a peculiarly dramatic portrait of perhaps the last inhabitants of a contemporary Latgale village.” y ivetavaivode.com

2014CDS DOCUMENTARY

ESSAY PRIZE WINNERIVETA VAIVODE

The next CDS Documentary Essay competition will be for writing; submissions will be accepted from November 1, 2014, to February 15, 2015.

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Pilcene, Latvia, 2012–13. Photographs by Iveta Vaivode.

In her photo essay “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path,” Iveta Vaivode seeks to create a new family album, one full of photographs of imagined memories. This unique body of work was chosen by a selec-tion committee at the Center for Documentary Studies to win the 2014 CDS Documentary Essay Prize, a competition that honors the best in documentary photography and writing in alternating years.

Vaivode, a freelance photographer based in Riga, Latvia, writes, “Looking at my parents’ family albums, I would imagine their lives before me. I constructed memories I didn’t have, playing them over and over again. Somehow I always felt that the people I saw in the albums differed from the people I saw next to me every day. These photographs, while connected with a particular family history, triggered my imagina-tion rather than gave me a specific knowledge. . . . “

The ambivalence of photographs, their possibilities and limitations, suggest that we should not trust images as records of our lives and histories. . . . My work addresses the idea of memory and ‘looking back’ through the creation of a narrative based on family history.”

For the last three years, Vaivode has been documenting the people of Pilcene, a remote village in east-ern Latvia (Latgale) where her grandmother and mother were born, to search for stories connected to her family. The rural landscape and the people were quite different than she had expected, transforming her project from “a nostalgic photo album into a peculiarly dramatic portrait of perhaps the last inhabitants of a contemporary Latgale village.” y ivetavaivode.com

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On the fourth Friday of each month, the CDS and South-ern Documentary Fund’s Fresh Docs work-in-progress screenings turn the Full Frame Theater into a unique collaborative space for filmmakers and audiences, figuratively throwing open the doors of the edit suite

to accommodate up to a hundred additional creative consul-tants for any given documentary. Filmmakers gain key perspec-tive on their work, while in the audience, both fellow filmmak-ers and documentary fans get to see the nuts and bolts of how a story is put together and offer the creator(s) feedback on the work. And starting this fall, another cohort will benefit from the screenings, as SDF executive director Rachel Raney inau-gurates the Fresh Docs Seminar through the CDS Continuing Education Program, a companion class for students hoping to dig deeper into the logistics of documentary production.

Three years ago, Raney took over the directorship of SDF and set about programming events that would pull together some of the organization’s roster of filmmakers. She started by schedul-ing a work-in-progress screening of Rodrigo Dorfman’s Monsieur Contraste, about local photographer Jean-Christian Rostagni. The success of that and a few more work-in-progress screen-ings convinced her that she had both the material and the audi-ence for a regular series. She helped to reboot the Fresh Docs screening series that CDS had started years earlier, which was enlivened when SDF joined as a partner.

Once the series got underway, filmmakers started to see the value and began lining up to participate. “Some people jump at the chance and immediately get the benefit of it,” says Raney. “Some people have to be cajoled into why it’s a really good thing. But if they come to a Fresh Docs screening and they see the way it unfolds, I think it becomes really apparent to them that it can be very fruitful for their process. And less scary than they might imagine.” Now she has more filmmakers than she has available slots—“A good sign of how prolific people are being in our own backyard.”

If it’s a truism that a fresh pair of eyes is essential to film editing, it’s especially true in the case of documentary, when filmmakers may have spent a hundred hours or more with their subjects. “They’re immersed in their story, and sometimes they can’t see the forest for the trees,” Raney says. “They don’t always see that some things that should be incredibly obvious to the audience aren’t, that there are very basic pieces of infor-mation that are missing.”

And whereas it’s common in the editing process for film-makers to seek out others’ opinions, Raney is convinced that there’s something irreplaceable about the larger, engaged audiences that Fresh Docs brings. “There’s truth in numbers,” she says. “What’s really great is when the feedback begins to coalesce into a set of clear steps forward for the filmmaker.

“It can be very frustrating if you have a number of work-in-progress screenings with very small groups,” she says, “and the feedback is all over the place. One person tells you shorter,

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one person tells you longer. One person loves a main charac-ter, the other finds him irritating. One person says, ‘That scene should be the first scene,’ the other says, ‘No, that’s your ending!’ And with Fresh Docs, because we’re opening it up to a broader audience, the feedback that’s most true ends up com-ing through pretty obviously from a number of people. I think that’s where the numbers matter.”

At each screening, Raney functions as emcee, making sure the audience members don’t just lob softball questions, but “roll up their sleeves and really dig into what’s working and what’s not working.” As the conversation unfolds and opinions begin to crystallize, audience members learn from Raney, and from each other, what sorts of decisions a documentarian needs to make to improve his or her film. This is where Raney got the idea for a seminar class that would dig still further.

“We knew work-in-progress screenings would be very fruitful for the filmmakers,” she says. “What I didn’t realize at the time is how enlightening it would be for the audience. Every Fresh Docs screening is a little like a mini master class in documen-tary filmmaking. And that’s what inspired the idea of the sem-inar—‘Wow, if the conversation about the editing of the film is this interesting, let’s take that same film and really go back and talk about the production: shooting the film, raising the money, marketing and distribution—what all that was like.”

Students of documentary filmmaking are often looking for direction in the form of guidelines and rules of thumb, of which there are certainly many; but the nature of the art is such that it’s often best approached with an openness to eventuality and chance, without rigid preconceptions. So too, documentary productions vary wildly in terms of budget, duration, gear, crew, and every other variable. For these reasons, the case-study method embodied in the Fresh Docs Seminar is an invaluable approach to learning about documentary, as students see, post-hoc, how the filmmaker wrangled a story from a particular set of assets and challenges. It’s the embodiment of another of filmmaking’s aphorisms—show, don’t tell.

— Marc Maximov, CDS Continuing Education coordinator

The Fresh Docs Seminar is a course offered through the Center for Documentary Studies Continuing Education program. Students will attend each of the fall season’s three Friday Fresh Docs screen-ings—September 26, October 24, and November 14—then meet the following Monday for an in-depth discussion with Rachel Raney and the filmmaker.

y cdscourses.org

ABOVE: Stills from recent Fresh Docs works-in-progress The Last Barn Dance, directed by Ted Richardson and Jason Arthurs, and Abandoned (middle), directed by Philip Brubaker. OPPOSITE: Shu-Cao Mo at an art camp in China, 2013. Photograph by Ge Wang.

A Documentary Film Series Moves to the Classroom

FRESH DOCS

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Undergraduate Education 2014 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Prizewinners

Established by CDS in 1989, the John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards go to undergraduates attending local universities to help them conduct summerlong documentary fieldwork projects. Revered scholar John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) was professor emeritus of history at Duke University. The awards are named in Dr. Franklin’s honor in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments and his dedication to students and teaching. Congratulations to our four 2014 award winners; we’ll be following their progress as their projects take shape:

Diego Camposeco (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill), a senior studying studio art, writes, “A little over twenty years ago, my parents emigrated from southern Mexico to North Carolina, which coincided with the first large wave of undocu-mented Mexican immigrants to the state.” He has been inves-tigating the connection between Latinos and the North Caro-lina landscape through large-format photography.

“I will be reaching out to contacts in Latino communities across the state, as well as people I meet along the way, and collaborate with them to perform the narratives that they want to present in relation to the landscape rather than impose jour-nalistic or documentary tropes such as submission or victimiza-tion. I will specifically focus on working with low-income com-munity members, the ones most susceptible to exploitation, to reveal historical allegories related to colonialism, religion, and culture through environments such as construction zones, fes-tivals, churches, crop fields, and domestic spaces. It is when documentary art intentionally blurs the lines between truth and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, that the richest dialogues can emerge.” Diego will create an exhibition of his images, as well as give photographs back to the people he collaborates with in creating the work.

Rinchen Dolma (Duke University), a junior majoring in inter-national comparative studies and documentary studies, was born in Amdo Ngawa, a remote village in northeast Tibet. At the age of ten she was admitted to “one of the largest Tibetan schools in exile,” the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) school in Dharamsala, India. She attended TCV for eight years, while her family remained in Tibet.

Rinchen is producing a video about the prevalence of tuber-culosis in the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, focusing particularly on how the community and its related health care institutions, such as Delek Hospital, are working to prevent the spread of TB. She writes, “Special populations, including Tibetan monks, nuns, and children living in Tibetan Children’s Village, face extraordinarily high rates of TB. Overall rates in Tibetan-in-exile communities are among the highest in the world. The main questions I will explore are why Tibetans in ex-ile are so vulnerable to TB and what can be done to reduce its high prevalence in the future.” Rinchen will conduct the project in collaboration with Delek Hospital’s Tibetan TB Control Pro-gram committee. The video, which she hopes will serve as “an educational multimedia tool,” will be shared with health care education organizations, schools, monasteries, and nunneries.

Shu-Cao Mo (Duke University) graduated in May 2014 with majors in philosophy and political science and a minor in the-ater studies. Collaborating with professors at Duke and Stan-ford, artists, teachers, and social workers, she will be working with the organizations Migrant Education Action Network, Teach for China, Today Art Museum, Save the Children, and Compassion for Migrant Children to create a sustainable art curriculum for children in underprivileged communities in China.

Shu-Cao writes that as a result of “China’s system for ‘in-ternal passports’ that imposes strict limits on the movement of its citizens . . . millions of ‘illegal’ migrant children attend ‘unofficial’ schools on the outskirts of industrial centers. Both migrant and rural schools are severely underfunded, and en-riching activities like art classes are rare. As a small attempt to mitigate these social, economic, and legal issues, I plan to launch a ‘guerilla’ art operation: to collect oral histories of migrant workers and children, curate art-and-writing summer camps in rural villages and migrant communities, and produce a documentary theater with workers and children.” She will also be part of a team developing a social media platform and a film to promote the art operation.

Katherine Zhang (Duke University), a double major in English and economics, graduated in May 2014. She is writing a piece of longform nonfiction, accompanied by photos and video, about the gentrification of New York City’s Chinatown with hopes of online publication. She writes, “Chinatown is deeply symbolic for me as a Chinese American who grew up in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. While studying with the Duke in New York program, I found a brick-and-mortar com-munity in Chinatown—the neighborhood where my father, now a university professor, hawked newspapers during his first years in America, the neighborhood where my eighty-year-old grandmother still resides, pushing her mini shopping cart full of fresh fish and vegetables. Little by little, an ethnic communi-ty’s heart and history is being swallowed by high rent prices.”

Katherine says she will anchor the story in personal nar-rative and her family’s immigrant experience, and that it will include “the history of the neighborhood, the activists fighting gentrification, the city planners, politicians, and real estate de-velopers, the yuppies moving in, and most of all, the longtime residents who are being displaced.”

To read full bios and review guidelines for the 2015 John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Awards:

ydocumentarystudies.duke.edu/awards

EDUCATIONFRESH DOCS

TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT (photo by or image of): Kristina Baker, Roxanne Campbell, Alex Cunningham, Tamika Galanis, Jon-Sesrie Goff, Qathi Gallaher Hart, Kihae Kim, Michaela O’Brien, Jason Oppliger, Dan Smith, Christopher Thomas, Beatriz Wallace, Wei Wang, Kyle Wilkinson, Michael Anthony Williams

MFA in Experimental and Documentary ArtsOne of the most innovative university arts programs in the country, Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts launched in 2011 as a joint initiative of the university’s Cen-ter for Documentary Studies, Program in Arts of the Moving Image, and Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. The two-year program brings together the documentary ap-proach and experimental production in analog and digital me-dia with a goal of fostering collaborations across practices and backgrounds. Students from the full arts spectrum are wel-come to apply, whether based in traditional fine arts such as painting, sculpture, writing, photography, and film, or so-called experimental practice such as computational and new media, sound work, performance, and installation. MFA|EDA direc-tor Tom Rankin has described current students and alumni as “artists who have infused all of Durham with a range of ideas that expand our notions of ‘experimental and documentary arts’ while also elevating the arts generally, on campus and in town.” A warm welcome to another fifteen students; present-ing the MFA|EDA’s class of 2016:

Kristina Baker was born and raised in Stockton, Califor-nia. She studied language and art at the Universitat Autòno-ma de Barcelona and completed her BFA at Sonoma State

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University, where she interned as a biofeedback techni-cian. She uses video, photography, and mixed-media assem-blage to examine patterns in behavior, habit, and ritual, ex-ploring “the ways that humans cope with the paradox of both wanting to live forever and trying to feel alive through some experience of dying.”

Roxanne Campbell grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and Brook-lyn, New York. She studied cinematography at the University of Virginia; her work in the field “explores adolescent develop-ment, gender roles, and education.” The past year she worked as an associate sales representative at Oracle Corporation in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alex Cunningham earned a BFA at Ithaca College, where he studied film, photography, and visual arts. The Virginia native’s work, “while crossing genres and modes such as experimen-tal, ethnographic, poetic documentary, and fiction, focuses on the relationship shared by humans and their immediate and global geography.” He has studied and produced work in India, including a documentary and a published book of pho-tographs; last year was spent working at Cornell as a photog-rapher for the Digital Conservation and Preservation Services, and driving around the country shooting for his next project.

Tamika Galanis was born in 1979 and raised in Nassau, Baha-mas. Her photographic work “examines the ideas of culture, identity, and social issues affecting women and children.” In

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132013, she earned a BA from Clayton State University in Geor-

gia, where she spent the past year coordinating undergradu-ate student media activities.

Jon-Sesrie Goff is a filmmaker and educator from Connecticut and upstate New York. He studied business, sociology, and theater at Morehouse College before receiving his BA from The New School, and spent the last two years as an adjunct professor at Villanova University and West Chester University of Pennsylvania. With more than a decade of production expe-rience, he has worked on a range of projects across genres, including the recent documentaries Evolution of a Criminal and Out in the Night. “Identity through the image of commu-nity” is the focus of his work.

Qathi Gallaher Hart was born in 1968 and grew up in and around Seattle. She began college at the age of forty at Seat-tle’s Shoreline Community College, studying photography and art history, and then received her BFA in animated arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Incorporating rotoscoping and live footage, her animated work “focuses on feminism, visibility, and equal rights, using hand-drawn cells, digital painting, and physical 3-D animation.” She has been working as a performance artist and production manager for a large annual arts festival.

Kihae Kim was born in Seoul, Korea, and has spent time in In-dia and Japan. He earned a BS in political science from Korea University, and his interest in photography led him to enroll at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2009. With an interest in “direct and honest photographs,” his works “depict the particular time and society in which he belongs.”

Michaela O’Brien is a documentary filmmaker and photogra-pher from Boston. For the past five years she has worked at Northern Light Productions, a nonfiction and documentary media outlet. She has worked on documentary broadcast specials, award-winning audiovisual installations and interac-tive videos, and freelance video and photographic works. After graduating from Boston College, she studied filmmaking and photography at the New England School of Photography and the New England Institute of Art. She is currently directing and producing In Crystal Skin, “a documentary shot in Bogotá, Colombia, that traces the lives of four individuals with Epider-molysis Bullosa, a severe inherited skin disorder.”

Jason Oppliger is “most fascinated by what’s just behind the thing we’re supposed to be looking at. Slightly to the left or right of it. Maybe it’s just off frame.” Drawn to “visual texture, haptic imagery, and insightful camera movement, with an affin-ity for the cultural detritus of our visually disintegrating urban imprints and their subsequent resurfacing,” his work typically has a sense of observation inside of it, captured through the medium itself: an acknowledgment of the frame. His films have played at various festivals, including SXSW, Vail Film Fes-tival, and the Thin Line Documentary Film Festival.

Dan Smith is a “photographer-turned-political scientist-turned-race car driver-turned-photographer” who has found himself ensconced in academia while raising a family in Durham, North Carolina. When he has the time, his photographic sub-jects range from nudes to motorsports, architecture to avia-tion, “and a little bit of documenting the world in which he’s found himself.”

Christopher Thomas is an artist and musician from Davidson, North Carolina. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, where he specialized in ex-perimental image making, sound, and performance, he moved to New York and worked for filmmaker Casey Neistat on the HBO series The Neistat Brothers and later, for the nonprofit Buckminster Fuller Institute. For the last two years, he has served as a teaching artist and coordinator for Studio 345, a free youth development/arts enrichment program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Beatriz Wallace was born in 1981 and grew up in New Or-leans. After studying English and photography at Amherst College, she helped implement digital storytelling for children exposed to family violence in rural Missouri, taught multime-dia journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and worked as a visiting professor at Duquesne University. She “uses art, data, and computer language to analyze, collect, and share stories.”

Wei Wang is a photojournalist, born and raised in China. When she was seven years old, her dad told her, “See that little win-dow? Put everything you want inside.” That’s how she learned to use a camera. After graduating with a university degree in English linguistics, she worked for Beijing Evening News as a photographer, “all from the observation of social problems, such as air pollution, the housing bubble, food security, and ethnic conflicts.” In 2011, she joined Reuters as a freelancer and covered a wide range of news stories around the world. Her work has been shown and collected by art galleries and foundations in China and New York.

Kyle Wilkinson grew up in Monroe, Ohio, and received a BFA in film production from Wright State University in Dayton. Through film and photography, his work explores “the relation-ship between people and the spaces they inhabit, examining the unseen mechanics that shape our society.” He has been a documentary cinematographer on Women Who Yell and the award-winning Sparkle, among other films, and was most recently a producer on the multimedia project Reinvention Stories, part of Localore, a nationwide initiative to encourage collaboration between film and radio.

Michael Anthony Williams received a BFA in professional theater with a concentration in directing from North Carolina A&T State University. A filmmaker who “loves the art in him-self instead of himself in the art,” he has dedicated his life to social change; filmmaking blends his love for the movies and passion for community involvement. He has produced several short films and one feature-length documentary.

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Continuing EducationSpring 2014 Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates

The Center for Documentary Studies offers Continuing Educa-tion classes in the documentary arts to people of all back-grounds. Some enroll in the Certificate in Documentary Arts program, which offers a structured sequence of courses culmi-nating in a final seminar and the completion of a substantial project, work that often moves out into the world in the form of exhibits, installations, films, websites, and more. The follow-ing six students completed their final projects in the Spring 2014 seminar, taught by folklorist and filmmaker Nancy Kalow. In May they presented their work to the public and received their certificates. Kudos to our graduates, and best wishes for future projects.

Inscape | Multimedia Video Michelle Hanes is a photographer from Seattle who moved to North Carolina to study filmmaking, writing, and audio at CDS and to earn her Masters of Liberal Studies at Duke. Inscape is an intimate glimpse into the studios of four artists located inside the historic Inscape Arts building, “a Seattle landmark that once housed dark memories.” The artists’ relationship to the physical space and the community they’ve established within it reveals how the building influences their work. Mi-chelle is now back in Seattle working on a multimedia project about a community of early-onset-memory-loss patients and a master’s thesis about photographers who give cameras to children so they can document their own lives.

In addition to the many established photography, video, audio, writing, multimedia, and special top-ics classes in our Continuing Education program’s Fall 2014 lineup, we’re excited about these brand-new offerings:Audio: The Short Subject Audio Documentary (also online)Photography: The Short SubjectVideo: 4x1: Four One-Minute Projects to Revitalize the Artist; Fresh Docs Seminar; Sound Design for Documentary Film; We Need to Talk About Final Cut Pro XSpecial Topics: Community-Based Participatory Research Seminar (online); The Power of Archives: Using Archival Materials in Documentary Projects (online); Story Collecting: Methods and Practices in Oral History

Spots remain in some Fall 2014 CDS Continuing Edu-cation classes y cdscourses.org

New Classes

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documentary collective that makes art about food systems and culture in the American South. Findings looks at the history of our closest evolutionary relatives—in the field, in entertainment, and in labs (the latter of which began in the 1930s, with two baby chimps that had been captured in the wild). Brooke uses archival footage, with special attention paid to one of the most famous primatologists, Jane Goodall.

Looking Around: A Memoir | Writing and MultimediaLeanne Simon was brought to the documentary arts through her social justice work; our CDS colleague has produced numerous videos and photo essays to help raise awareness of issues and to spur communities to action. Looking Around tells her story, a “dreadful avalanche of a child” who leaves home at the age of fourteen in search of what she considers her missing piece—family. She instead finds dysfunctional relationships, life on the run, and drug addiction. At twenty-six, she is hooked on heroin, married to a batterer, and pregnant. When the state Department of Social Services takes the baby away, she discovers the true meaning of family. In her journey to recover her son, she also discovers what she “had been looking for all along: quiet.”

Spring 2014 Certificate in Documentary Arts projects: y cdsporch.org/archives/22348

Learn more about the Certificate in Documentary Arts, including the distance-learning option: y cdscourses.org > Certificate in Documentary Arts

Durham-Based Video and Audio ProjectsAs part of CDS’s renewed commitment to engaging the Durham communities, participants in our Continuing Educa-tion program’s documentary video and introductory audio institutes, held here every summer, produced short docs on some of the people, places, and institutions that make up the fabric of life in two historic and rapidly changing parts of town—the East Durham and Cleveland-Holloway neigh-borhoods. Students in the weeklong Documentary Video Institute learned all aspects of documentary filmmaking, producing short docs that were presented to the public at the Full Frame Theater and that will be screened again at a neighborhood event this fall. Students in the Hearing Is Believing Institute learned the art of audio storytelling, pro-ducing five-minute narratives that were played at a public listening event. Enjoy.

Video projects y cdsporch.org/archives/22456

Audio projects y cdsporch.org/archives/22551

Invitation to Trespass | Multimedia Jane Marsh is a North Carolina native from High Point, which she describes as fertile ground to explore her “first creative loves,” photography and film. She worked in com-mercial photography studios serving the High Point home furnishings industries and as a set and interior designer before enrolling at CDS. Invitation to Trespass is about the unlikely friendship between Mr. Smylie, an older man in poor health, and herself, “a younger, energetic lady who volunteers for the American Cancer Society.” The piece is woven together through Smylie’s archival photographs from post–World War II Europe while serving in the Air Force and Jane’s photos of Smylie taken decades later.

The Roots of a Porcelain Rose | AudioHanes Motsinger left North Carolina at age twenty-two and began a round-the-world journey “with camera and pen in hand,” an experience that nourished her wish to tell stories that foster cross-cultural understanding and social change. Luziela de Jesus Gaspar-Martins, a woman that Hanes met in England in 2009, is the star of The Roots of a Porce-lain Rose. By age thirty-one, “Luzi” had lived, worked, and studied in numerous countries around the world, spending only nine years in her country of birth, Angola. In this au-dio documentary, Luzi reflects on her experiences to make sense of the people, places, sounds, smells, and tastes she calls “home.”

The Guardians of History | Audio and Photography Mary Samouelian is the Abraham Joshua Heschel Process-ing Archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. An avid photogra-pher, she enrolled at CDS in 2011 to expand her knowledge of documentary art forms and to explore different media for telling stories. Mary’s project is about seven archivists working in the Technical Services Department of the Ru-benstein Library. “Guardians explores why we archivists do what we do and how our work makes it possible for researchers, historians, writers, and the general public to discover and experience intimate connections between their lives and historical materials.”

Findings | Video Brooke Darrah Shuman moved to Durham after she took a weeklong video course at CDS and “found the heat, the trains, and the barbecue too good to pass up.” With some friends she met at CDS, Brooke helped start Vittles Films, a

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Leanne Simon, circa 1995. Photograph by Artie Dixon.

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Kelvin Carter, who transferred from North Carolina State University to North Carolina Central University to fur-ther his education in broadcast media, worked as the communications intern at the Center for Documentary Studies this summer, from May to August. He was drawn to the internship by the diverse opportunities to tell stories. “I like to entertain people. Whether it’s telling a sad story or a happy story, I want the people who hear a story to have a new understanding or think about how to get their own story out,” Kelvin says. CDS offered him the opportunity to learn how stories are put together, and through his various duties as an intern, he cre-ated multimedia projects as well as helped design and produce an animated CDS 25th anniversary logo and a number of printed pieces.

Kelvin first got interested in the arts in high school, where he was involved with choral music. His love of per-forming translated into studying theater arts in college, which ultimately influenced his decision to kick engineer-ing to the curb and fully embrace his studies in mass communications.

As for what happens next, Kelvin plans on finishing his degree and pursuing his dream to become a reporter, news producer, director, and eventually, the talent in front of the camera.

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OTHER NEWS

Tria Smothers started working for the Center for Docu-mentary Studies as a development assistant in June, and she had a challenge ahead of her: the CDS data-bases needed a major overhaul in preparation for a new fundraising initiative. Much of her time this summer was spent rebuilding and updating databases while learning about CDS programs and researching new grant opportunities.

In addition to learning new software, Tria says she was able to develop her attention to detail and de-scription. “I enjoyed exercising that part of my mind. I wanted everything I did to be clear and concise without rushing through it.” Tria’s work will provide crucial sup-port for CDS’s upcoming development efforts.

Tria, a senior at Duke studying international com-parative studies with a minor in dance (she performs West African and modern dance), graduates in Decem-ber 2014. She’s thinking about a career in international business, but her post-CDS, post-Duke future is still up in the air. “I’m just trying to keep an open mind,” she says. Ultimately, though, she knows she’d like travel to play a large part in her life, whether that includes busi-ness school or not.

CDS Thanks Our Summer Superstars

This summer, spearheaded by CDS Continuing Ed audio alums Elizabeth Friend and Jenny Morgan, CDS cohosted what turned out to be a hit series of “community listening parties” with SPECTRE Arts. Held outdoors at the Durham visual and performance arts organization, Audio Under the Stars was part of the Durham Third Friday series of events and hap-penings. In June, July, and August, attendees were treated to audio stories that explored the themes “Sound Solstice,” “Fish Out of Water,” and “Feast or Famine.” Due to popular demand, the series will continue; we’ll keep you posted via CDS Porch, Face-book, and Twitter.

AUDIO UNDER THE STARS

LEFT: Self-portrait by Kelvin Carter. RIGHT: Self-portrait by Tria Smothers.

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