Professor Diablo Returns to Durham on May 28 to Investigate “Lost and Found”
Co-presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hinge Literary Center, Professor Diablo’s True Revue is a collaborative performance series showcasing artists—writers, musicians, visual artists, and others—who make use of documentary ideas, methods, and impulses in the creation of their work. Following five full house performances since its launch in the spring of 2012, [...]
Physician Residents Will Share Documentary Projects at June 5 Event
The Documenting Medicine program provides Duke physician residents with the tools and skills to produce documentary projects that explore patient experiences. “I think ultimately, we all went into medicine for the stories,” says internal medicine resident Mallika Dhawan. “Understanding these stories is what makes us better at our jobs. How can we treat our patients and [...]
Summertime Means Shorts! Fresh Docs Screenings on June 6, American Tobacco Campus
Next up in the Fresh Docs film series, two short documentary films hot out of the editing suite: Judy Van Wyk’s Musings of an Iraqi Patriot and Rodrigo Dorfman’s Tommy! The Dreams I Keep Inside Me. Fresh Docs is a works-in-progress film series presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Southern Documentary [...]
Make a Short Doc with Help from “Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary,” a CDS E-Book
The Center for Documentary Studies’ first e-book, Visual Storytelling, is for anyone who wants to make a watchable short documentary using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Nancy Kalow, who has taught at CDS for twelve years and chairs the selection committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, has written a step-by-step [...]
CDS Names New Director: Award-Winning Historian Wesley C. Hogan
Originally published on the Duke Today website: Wesley C. Hogan, a historian widely honored for her documentary work on the civil rights movement, has been named the new director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She begins her appointment on July 1. Hogan will be only the third director of CDS, which was [...]
Spring 2013 Certificate in Documentary Arts Students Present Final Projects on Friday, May 17
Eleven continuing education students in the Certificate in Documentary Arts program at the Center for Documentary Studies will present their final projects to the public and receive their certificates. A reception will follow at the Center for Documentary Studies. The students and their projects are described below. Certificate in Documentary Arts Project Presentations Friday, May 17, [...]
Celebration of “One Place”: Exhibit Reception, Talk, and Book Signing with Editor Tom Rankin, April 25
Oxford American editor Roger Hodge calls the book “a masterpiece of documentary art.” Renowned photographer Alec Soth says it’s “an American classic.” An event celebrating the publication of One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia, will include a talk and signing by Center for Documentary Studies director Tom Rankin, [...]
CDS Relaunches Lange-Taylor Prize; Deadline Extended to May 7, 2013
The Center for Documentary Studies is proud to re-launch the Lange-Taylor Prize, which supports documentary artists—working alone or in teams—who are involved in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects that rely on and exploit, in intriguing and effective ways, the interplay of words and images in the creation and presentation of their work. The updated guidelines expand [...]
Documentary Writers Series: “River Bend Chronicle” Author Ben Miller on the Junkification of His Iowa Boyhood, April 15
The Center for Documentary Studies, in cooperation with The Hinge Literary Center, is pleased to bring writer Ben Miller to Durham for our Documentary Writers Series, a regular showcase of nonfiction authors who write artfully observed stories about the world. The series is part of our ongoing commitment to find audiences for new and notable work [...]
Full Frame Winners Announced: Grand Jury, CDS Filmmaker, and Other Festival Awards
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival announced the 2013 festival award recipients on April 7, 2013, the last day of the sixteenth annual event. Ten awards and two Honorable Mentions were given, including Full Frame’s top prize, the Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award (American Promise), and the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award (Kalyanee [...]
New Book and Exhibit: “One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia”
“I am frequently asked by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life documenting one simple place like Decatur County, Georgia. People confuse simple with small; they’re not the same thing. There are no simple places or simple lives. . . . . Life [in Decatur County] is like life everywhere, and I [...]
Gerard H. Gaskin Wins 2012 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography judge Deborah Willis, the renowned curator, historian, and photographer, has chosen Gerard H. Gaskin to win the prize for his black-and-white and color photographs that document the African American and Latino house and ballroom community. Willis says that she found Gaskin’s photographs “innovative and spirited,” the images filled with both [...]
Photos as Philanthropy: What Does Poverty Look Like?
CDS’s Publishing and Awards Director Alexa Dilworth was a judge, along with Margaret Aguirre, Phil Borges, John Isaac, and Denise Wolff, for Photo Philanthropy’s 2012 Activist Awards at the end of January. Photo Philanthropy, based in San Francisco, champions “social change, one photo at a time,” and the judges were looking for “photo essays that [...]
Watch “Your Voice, Their Money”: A Student-Produced Documentary on Big Money in Politics
A new short video produced by Duke University undergraduates in the Fall 2012 Video for Social Change course taught at the Center for Documentary Studies focuses on the effects of the Citizens United decision on state level politics in North Carolina and how citizens are fighting for campaign finance reforms. Your Voice, Their Money was produced in association [...]
Videographer Bill Wallauer is Host Speaker at Fourth Annual Primate Palooza
Accomplished videographer Bill Wallauer, whose work has contributed to wildlife and science documentaries such as PBS’s Nature and BBC’s Planet Earth, will be the host speaker at Duke’s fourth annual Primate Palooza. Duke Roots & Shoots, a student arm of the Jane Goodall Institute, hosts the week-long event series, which aims to raise awareness of primate [...]
50 Years of Black Students at Duke: Year-Long Commemoration in 2013 Celebrates Historic Milestone
In 1963, the first five black undergraduates enrolled at Duke University—Mary Mitchell Harris, Gene Kendall, Wilhelmina “Mimi” Reuben-Cooke, Cassandra Smith Rush, and Nathaniel “Buddy” White. At that time, the university had no black faculty, administrators, or trustees. The first students encountered culture shock as they forever changed the fabric of the university. An already “sold-out” opening [...]
CDS Instructor Gary Hawkins On His Screenplay for “Joe,” the New Film From Director David Gordon Green
In November 2012 production began on Joe, a film based on the novel by the late Larry Brown. The screenplay was written by filmmaker Gary Hawkins, an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies whose writing and directing credits include the acclaimed documentaries The Rough South of Harry Crews and The Rough South of Larry Brown. Joe [...]
“Little War on the Prairie”: Listen to “This American Life” Broadcast of New CDS Radio Documentary
A new one-hour radio documentary produced by Center for Documentary Studies audio director John Biewen—”Little War on the Prarie”—aired on This American Life recently. The documentary tells the long-overlooked story of one of the key episodes in the Plains Indian wars of the nineteenth century, a troubling history that Biewen, a Minnesota native, says is “deeply [...]
“Colors of Confinement”: New Book Features Rare Color Photos of Japanese American Internment
In 1942, Bill Manbo and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings using Kodachrome film—a technology then just seven years old—to capture community celebrations and to record his family’s struggle [...]
George C. Stoney, 1916–2012: CDS Director Tom Rankin Remembers an Iconic Documentarian
In George Stoney’s July 14 obituary, the New York Times described him as “a dean of American documentary film . . . acclaimed in equal measure for his roles as a filmmaker, teacher, and prophet of social change at the barrel of a camera.” Here, Center for Documentary Studies director Tom Rankin shares a few thoughts on [...]
Watch Student Films from the 2012 Summer Video Institute
Every summer the Center for Documentary Studies holds a series of Documentary Institutes. The Documentary Video Institute is an eight-day intensive where students are fully immersed in the process of documentary filmmaking. Working in small production teams (one instructor for every four students) led by experienced documentary filmmakers, students are introduced to an array of [...]
Listen: “Southern Slices: Summer Institute Stories from CDS” Purchased by WGBH Boston
Radio-making isn’t just for professionals. Every summer, several dozen people from across the country converge on the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to learn the skills of audio documentary work—recording, shaping and crafting a piece, and mixing it on the computer. They get guidance and inspiration from seasoned producers. (They also tend to [...]
Natasha Trethewey, Former Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor, Named U.S. Poet Laureate
Natasha Trethewey, former Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill, has been named the nineteenth U.S. Poet Laureate; the announcement was made by Librarian of Congress James Billington. Trethewey is currently a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. The Center for [...]
Register Now for CDS Summer Institutes and Workshops—and Watch and Listen to Projects from Summer 2011
From the Intensive Introduction to Documentary Studies to Digging In: An Audio Retreat with Big Shed, the Center for Documentary Studies is offering seven summer learning opportunities through its continuing education program. These intensive sessions, lasting from two to eight days, are open to the general public (and their completion counts as credit toward the [...]
