Undergraduate Education Overview, Mission, and Learning Outcomes

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester – Fall 2012 Courses

Current and Past Semester Courses – Spring 2012 Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Graduation with Distinction

Documentary Studies Courses and Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS




Instructors

Kelly Alexander
kellyalexander9@hotmail.com



Kelly Alexander is a writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is a consulting editor to Saveur magazine and the author of numerous feature stories for that publication. Her article “Hometown Appetites,” an homage to the great American food writer Clementine Paddleford, won the James Beard Journalism Award and will be the basis for a biography and cookbook to be published by Penguin in fall 2007. Prior to joining Saveur, Alexander worked as the restaurant editor of Microsoft’s New York Sidewalk and as an assistant editor at Food & Wine magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. Last year her story “Multicultural Meat,” about the cross-cultural significance of brisket, was nominated for a Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Alexander is also a regular contributor on the subject of food to the NPR program “The State of Things,” which airs daily on WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, creative writing, and anthropology.

Read more about Kelly Alexander on CDS Porch





Bill Bamberger
bill@billbamberger.com

Photographer Bill Bamberger is known for the innovative ways he has engaged whole communities in the production of his work. His projects explore large social issues of our time by looking at how they are manifest in our families and communities. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory with Cathy N. Davidson won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His photographs have appeared in Aperture, Doubletake, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine. He is currently working on BALL, a grassroots project that explores the democratization of basketball and the intersection of sports and culture in American life.

John Biewen
jbiewen@duke.edu



John Biewen directs the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies, where he teaches and produces documentary work for NPR, Public Radio International, and other audiences. His reporting and documentary work has taken him across the United States and to Europe, Japan, and India. He covered the Rocky Mountain West for NPR News, and then he spent eight years as a correspondent with American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media. His work has won many honors, including two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards for Outstanding Coverage of the Disadvantaged and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award. Biewen teaches undergraduates and continuing education students in the Certificate in Documentary Studies programs at CDS.

Read more about John Biewen on CDS Porch







Erin Espelie
erin.espelie@duke.edu

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, editor, and university lecturer, based in the Colorado Rockies and New York City. As a filmmaker, Espelie works with a range of media, from Super 8 film to high-definition digital video, to make poetic, nonfiction cinema about issues in environmental history, current scientific research, and questions of epistemology. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Singapore International Film Festival, and more.

Most of her professional print career has been on the staff of Natural History magazine, where she serves as executive editor and a columnist. Since 2002 her monthly column, "The Natural Explanation," has highlighted high-caliber wildlife photographers and human influences on the environment. She also freelances for a variety of publications. A scientist by training, Espelie holds a degree in molecular biology and genetics from Cornell University. She has worked in bacteriology and virology laboratories at the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Cornell. In 2010 Espelie was awarded a Ted Scripps Visiting Faculty Fellowship in the School of Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder and spent the year researching the human microbiome and completing a film about the chytrid fungus.

Wendy Ewald
wendyewald@aol.com



Wendy Ewald is creative director of Literacy Through Photography, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies that teaches elementary- and middle-school students to express themselves through photography and writing. A senior research associate at CDS, she has been involved in several special projects for teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. These include Black Self/White Self and American Alphabets, which explore race and ethnicity in America. Ewald has worked as a photographer, teacher, and documentary writer for more than thirty years. She has had exhibitions in major museums in the United States and in Europe. She has published seven books and received many grants and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. At CDS, Ewald teaches the course Literacy Through Photography: Teaching Photography and Writing in Elementary and Middle Schools; she also has been co-teaching a Duke/UNC course on various approaches to documentary photography since Spring 2003. Her book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children, was published by CDS/Lyndhurst Books and Beacon Press in 2001.

Read more about Wendy Ewald on CDS Porch






Karlyn Forner
kdf5@duke.edu



Karlyn Forner, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Duke University, is focusing her research on twentieth-century U.S. history with a concentration on African American and the American South. Her dissertation examines the black freedom struggle in Selma, Alabama, throughout the course of the twentieth century. She investigates how black residents’ diverse traditions of resistance to white supremacy created a foundation for the nationally geared voting-rights campaign that took place in the city in 1965. She then probes how the movement’s failure to secure economic rights in combination with the federal government’s unequal investment in the Sunbelt South hindered the tangible gains of black Selmians’ fight for justice and equality. Oral history is at the heart of her research, and she actively collaborates with the Selma Stories project, an Alabama-based oral history project. South African history is Forner’s secondary focus. Her research concentrates on how white, English-speaking churches fought against the apartheid regime, specifically focusing on the life of Methodist minister Peter Storey. She also has spent every summer since 2009 coordinating the DukeEngage program in Cape Town. Forner was born and raised in central Minnesota and completed her bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.






Amy Laura Hall
alhall@ div.duke.edu



Amy Laura Hall is the author of Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, and numerous scholarly articles in theological and biomedical ethics. She recently received a grant from the Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology for her current book project, Erecting the Pulpit: Muscular Christianity from Victoria to Viagra.

Named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2004-2005, Hall has received funding from the Lilly Foundation, the Josiah Trent Memorial Foundation, the American Theological Library Association, the Child in Religion and Ethics Project, the Pew Foundation and, most recently, the Arete Project at the University of Chicago.

At Duke University, Hall has served on the Steering Committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center, as a faculty member for the FOCUS program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy, and on the Duke Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board. She also has been an ethics consultant to the V.A. Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Hall, a member of the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, has spoken to academic and ecclesial groups across the U.S. and Europe. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, she is a member of the Southwest Texas Annual Conference. She has served both urban and suburban parishes.





Alex Harris
aharris@duke.edu



Alex Harris is a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies and of DoubleTake Magazine. He has taught documentary photography and writing at Duke since 1975. Among his books are River of Traps, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in 1991, and The Idea of Cuba (2007). His photographs are in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Harris is collaborating with the socio-biologist E.O. Wilson on a book set in Mobile, Alabama, that focuses on the role of place in the life of the individual and of the broader society. He is also photographing housing and living conditions across North Carolina for a book that will connect his contemporary photographs and observations with images he produced on the same theme in the early 1970s. As a teacher, Harris helped to launch the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program at Duke and is currently teaching documentary writing and photography fieldwork seminars through CDS and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Harris is an expert on color digital printing and emphasizes the latest digital technology to produce color prints in some of his classes. Harris co-directs the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, a year-long postgraduate fellowship program based at the Center for Documentary Studies in which recent Duke graduates work with NGOs and humanitarian organizations focused on marginalized families and children. All Hine Fellows complete an in-depth documentary project to benefit the non-governmental organizations and communities with which they work.

Alex Harris's work can be seen on the Web at http://alex-harris.com.

Read more about Alex Harris on CDS Porch






Gary Hawkins
hawkatduke@gmail.com



Gary Hawkins was born and raised in Thomasville, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in fine arts, and the University of Southern California, where he majored in cinema. He joined the directing faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts, in the School of Filmmaking, in 1991 and taught there until 1999. Hawkins has written and directed six films. His second, The Rough South of Harry Crews, won an Emmy and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Gold Award in 1992. The Rough South of Larry Brown, the latest in Hawkins’s on-going series about working-class Southern authors, was picked by The Oxford American as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries and was reviewed by Variety as a “beautifully conceived documentary film.” The Rough South of Larry Brown won Best Feature at the Savannah Film & Video Festival, Best Feature at the Ohio Independent Film Festival, and Best Documentary Feature at the Oxford Film Festival. Hawkins’s screenplay DownTime was selected by The Sundance Institute for the Writer’s Lab in the winter of 2000. Presently Hawkins is adapting two novels into screenplays for Capricorn Films.

Read more about Gary Hawkins on CDS Porch





Frank Hunter
platpal@earthlink.net



Frank Hunter was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the desert Southwest. He has an M.A. in communications from the University of Colorado and an M.F.A. in photography from Ohio University, where he was the John Cady Graduate Fellow in Fine Art. Hunter has taught at the university level for more than twenty years. His interest in photographic process includes the technical process of exposure and development as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of creating photographic work. Hunter is best known for his landscape photographs done in the nineteenth-century process known as platinum/palladium. His recent work includes a commission done for the Federal Reserve Bank documenting Midtown Atlanta at the turn of the millennium, which was shown at the High Museum in Atlanta in 2003. His work is represented in a number of public and private collections, including the Speed Museum, the Denver Museum of Art, the High Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

Read more about Frank Hunter on CDS Porch





Katie Hyde
kahyde@duke.edu



Katie Hyde is the director of Literacy Through Photography (LTP), a program based at the Center for Documentary Studies. In this capacity, she works closely with undergraduate students, community volunteers, and teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. Hyde is also one of the leaders of LTP Arusha, a DukeEngage initiative that is part of an effort to work with teachers in Arusha, Tanzania, to build an LTP program. She teaches a course on Literacy Through Photography that deals with children’s self-expression and with race and gender issues within education. Hyde also teaches a course called Sociology Through Photography, using documentary photography as a tool to see the world through a sociological lens. Hyde earned her doctorate in sociology at North Carolina State University. She has explored how social inequalities are constructed, perpetuated, and resisted through fieldwork and other research on recent Latino/a immigration in North Carolina, women’s activism in Russia, and girls’ education in rural Nepal.

Read more about Katie Hyde on CDS Porch





Dante James
dante.james@duke.edu



Dante James, an Emmy-award-winning independent filmmaker, was named an artist-in-residence instructor/filmmaker at Duke University in 2006. That year he received three Emmy nominations for his work as writer and director on the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, and he was awarded an Emmy for his work as series producer. The following year he conceptualized, produced, and directed The Doll, a dramatic short film based on a story by Charles W. Chesnutt which has screened at film festivals around the world, including the Pan African International Film Festival in Cannes, France. Most recently, James wrote and directed Harlem in Montmartre for PBS’s Great Performances. The documentary, which tells the story of the jazz age in Paris between 1920 and 1945, explores an abandoned but crucial aspect of the African American cultural experience and its effect on the international stage.

Earlier in his career James worked with his friend and mentor, Henry Hampton, founder and executive producer of Blackside Films, which is best known for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. For Blackside, James executive produced This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys. He also produced and directed films for the PBS series America’s War on Poverty and The Great Depression. Both series were awarded the Silver Baton, Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award.

James was recognized as a distinguished alumnus by Grand Valley State University in 1994, and in December 2007 the university awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters. He has also earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Duke University.

In 2010, James will turn his creative efforts to the production of an independent feature film, which will be shot in Detroit and in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Nancy Kalow
nkalow@duke.edu



Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker who has taught at CDS since 2000. She attended Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.) and was a Rockefeller Fellow at UNC's University Center for International Studies. She has
documented Southern traditional music and material culture, Primitive Baptist preaching and visionary narratives in eastern North Carolina, and the music and religious folklife of the Mexican community in central North Carolina. Two of her video documentaries are online: Sadobabies, winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film
Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival, and The Losers Club. Her documentary project on “Dead Media” includes a website and a video. She has been co-chair of the Selection Committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
since 2003.

Read more about Nancy Kalow at CDS Porch






Michelle Lanier
michelle.lanier@gmail.com



Michelle Lanier, Acting Director of North Carolina’s African American Heritage Commission and Curator of Multicultural Initiatives with North Carolina’s State Historic Sites, uses her background as an oral historian and folklorist to connect communities around the state’s rich cultural resources. She also brings the ethical issues of public history and documentary work into the classroom, as an instructor since 2000 with CDS. 

Read more about Michelle Lanier on CDS Porch






Barbara Lau
balau@duke.edu



Barbara Lau is director of the Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center, an effort to activate history for social change inspired by the life and legacy of activist, poet, lawyer and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray. From 1999 to 2009, she directed community documentary projects at the Center for Documentary Studies. In that position she led nationally recognized documentary programs for youth and the documentary/public art project Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life. Lau has more than twenty years of professional experience as a folklorist, oral historian, teacher, curator, radio producer, and arts consultant. She earned a B.A. in sociology/urban studies from Washington University in St. Louis (1980) and an M.A. in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2000).

Read more about Barbara Lau on CDS Porch






Roger Lucey
roger.lucey@duke.edu



Roger Lucey is a South African musician, songwriter, and filmmaker. His early music career was curtailed by the apartheid government, precipitating his move to the film industry. He worked as news cameraman/producer during the 1980s and 1990s throughout Southern Africa and later covered events in the rest of Africa and Eastern Europe. More recently he worked as arts editor for South Africa’s largest independent national broadcaster, where he was director of documentaries. He continues to make music and documentaries on a variety of subjects. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Duke.

Read more about Roger Lucey on CDS Porch





John Moses
moses001@mc.duke.edu



John Moses is a primary care pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center. While he was an undergraduate student at Duke, Moses took a photography class from CDS faculty member Alex Harris. Before attending medical school, he spent a year photographing the conditions of migrant farmworkers in the Southeast. His current projects include a book about primary care medicine and a book about children and illness. His courses include Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography, part of the Focus Program, and Children and the Experience of Illness, in which students teach photography to children being treated for illness and write about their experiences during the semester. Of the class, he says, “It has become a way for students to process their own issues with illness.” Moses plans to continue developing other opportunities for undergraduates to work with documentary studies and medicine.

Read more about John Moses on CDS Porch





Duncan Murrell
duncan.murrell@duke.edu



Duncan Murrell is an award-winning writer and journalist from North Carolina. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Normal School and a consulting editor at Southern Cultures. His work has also appeared in The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and several other magazines and newspapers. He has been a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. In 2006 he spent eight months living in New Orleans while writing “In The Year of the Storm,” a long work that appeared in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s. Murrell has also written about immigration, termites, vultures, and hogs; he’s written profiles of politicians, most recently General Wesley Clark; and he’s written extensively on the economics and social life of small towns. He is currently at work on a long project for Harper’s on Latino immigration as seen through the eyes of people living in the rural South. Before writing full-time, Murrell was an editor at Algonquin Books, where he acquired and edited several national bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction. He also has worked as a newspaper writer in Alabama and Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Northwestern University. “Speaking of words, few essayists put them together any better.” (The Chicago Tribune)

Read more about Duncan Murrell on CDS Porch





Liisa Ogburn
liisa.ogburn@duke.edu



Liisa Ogburn, who founded the Documenting Medicine program in 2010, worked in the international health field for five years before helping to start a multimedia company in San Francisco, where she worked with numerous clients, including the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Symphony, and Apple. She produced her first web-based documentary project in 2000, a series of oral histories with the first Internet pioneers. Since then, she has worked on a number of projects involving audio, photography, and the web. She also directed a documentary fellowship program for Duke graduates at the Center for Documentary Studies and taught several courses for undergraduates. She is currently completing an audio and web project on the first historic district in North Carolina, which was recently featured on The State of Things, and is finishing a book, How Motherhood Changes Us, featuring stories she collected from mothers across the country. Her fall course, Documentary Engagement, will focus on documenting patient stories around a health issue of national importance: youth obesity. To read about Documenting Medicine, go to http://www.documentingmedicine.com/. Ogburn’s other work can be seen at http://www.wiredforstories.com/.

Read more about Liisa Ogburn on CDS Porch






Bruce Orenstein
bruce.orenstein@duke.edu



Bruce Orenstein is founder and director of the Chicago Video Project (CVP), a nonprofit production company that produces documentaries and public policy videos about social and economic issues for nonprofit public-interest organizations and public television. Among its many productions, CVP has produced videos for campaigns to pass living-wage laws in Chicago and Los Angeles, increase the supply of affordable housing in Chicago, and expand early childhood programs throughout Illinois. Orenstein’s television credits include the 2003 Midwest Emmy award-wining WTTW documentary No Place to Live: Chicago’s Affordable Housing Crisis and the 1999 PBS national broadcast of The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy. With a grant from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Democratic Promise was placed in 1,900 civic and community development organizations where it was used as a training tool for community members. In 2008, PBS aired Orenstein’s American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver, a documentary about an unheralded American hero who was a principal figure in the creation of the country’s public service programs, including the Peace Corps, VISTA, Community Action, and Legal Services for the Poor. Prior to producing policy videos and documentaries, Orenstein had a thirteen-year career as a community organizer in Chicago, Illinois; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Seattle, Washington.

Read more about Bruce Orenstein on CDS Porch

Karen Price
karenelizabeth24@yahoo.com



Karen Price is a North Carolina-raised documentary filmmaker, producer, and writer. Her award-winning feature documentary, HouseQuake, tells the story of how the Democratic Party took over Congress in 2006. The film won the Directorial Discovery Award at its festival premiere at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, received a wide Video on Demand release, and made its national television premiere on the Documentary Channel in November 2010. Price directed the documentary Living by Instinct: Animals and their Rescuers, which was broadcast on PBS stations and won several national awards, including a Student Emmy. She has directed, produced, and written for documentaries and shows appearing nationally and internationally on Discovery Health Channel, The Travel Channel, Animal Planet, and Lifetime. Price has served as a consulting producer and director on a number of documentary projects, produced congressional campaign advertisements for Murphy Putnam Media, and is a resident blogger at The Huffington Post. She received an A.B. in English and political science from Duke University, an M.A. in creative writing and English from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. 







Susie Post-Rust
susie@susiepostrust.com



Susie Post-Rust is a veteran magazine and newspaper photojournalist who has spent the last two decades documenting the lives of people in more than twenty countries. Her passion throughout her career has been in-depth documentary projects that reveal small communities and the people who live in them. For more than ten years she worked for National Geographic magazine, while also contributing to Life, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and the New York Times, as well as nonprofit charity groups, including World Vision, the North Carolina Food Bank, Food for the Hungry, and Compassion International. She has an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia and a BSBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1986 she was honored with the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Coverage of the Disadvantaged in recognition of her photographic essay Jerry: A Troubled Mind, the story of one man’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Susie Post-Rust's work can be seen on the Web at http://www.susiepostrust.com/,

Read more about Susie Post-Rust on CDS Porch





Tom Rankin
tom.rankin@duke.edu



Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies, professor of the practice of art and documentary studies, and director of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for more than twenty years. Formerly associate professor of art and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi and chair of the Art Department at Delta State University, he was educated at Tufts University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Georgia State University. A native of Kentucky, he has curated a number of exhibitions and published numerous articles and reviews on photography and Southern culture. His photographs have been published widely in numerous magazines, journals, and books, and he has exhibited throughout the country. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; 'Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre': Photographs of a River Life (1995); Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).

Read more about Tom Rankin on CDS Porch





Elena Rue
elena.rue@duke.edu



Elena Rue is a multimedia storyteller who uses the camera as a tool for exploration and learning. As a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow in 2006, she spent ten months working with a nongovernmental organization, Hope for Children, in Ethiopia. For three years she coordinated the Literacy Through Photography program at the Center for Documentary Studies. She is a 2011 graduate of the master’s program at the UNC–Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she was a 2010 Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellow and a 2010–11 Reese Felts Digital Newsroom Fellow. Rue teaches photography and multimedia courses and directs the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows program at the Center for Documentary Studies. She is also co-founder of StoryMine Media, a production company based in Carrboro, North Carolina. Rue's work can be seen on the web at http://elenarue.com

Read more about Elena Rue on CDS Porch





Margaret Sartor
msartor@duke.edu



Margaret Sartor is a photographer and writer whose past projects include What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (with co-editor Geoff Dyer) and the best-selling memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s. Her photographs are in many permanent and private collections and have appeared in Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harper's, and The New Yorker, among other publications. At CDS, Sartor teaches the seminar Photography in Context: Photographic Meaning and the Duke Photography Archive. “Given the centrality of photography in our culture,” she explains, “it seems increasingly important to examine the assumptions that govern our understanding of the medium. In this course, students will analyze bodies of photographic work, taking into consideration their own response to the images, the historical moment in which the pictures were made, the personal history and artistic sensibility of the photographer, the tools of the medium, and the ways in which all of these factors come together to create a meaningful depiction of the world.” Currently, Sartor’s own work, as a writer and a photographer, focuses on her family and childhood home of Monroe, Louisiana.

Read more about Margaret Sartor on CDS Porch





Lisa Satterwhite
lisa.satterwhite@duke.edu



Lisa Satterwhite, an artist and a biologist, holds a B.A. in fine art and art history and an M.S. in zoology (University of Tennessee) and a Ph.D. in cell biology (Johns Hopkins University). While a cancer research fellow at Princeton University, she studied photography in the Program for Visual Arts, and since that time she has used photography and basic research to tackle issues of health inequity and social justice. Her current photographic work documents cultural erasure from unrestricted land development in the mountains and explores sense of place, belonging, and stewardship. A series of interviews and portraits explore how women of color feel about our recent presidential election. In her research, Satterwhite is creating a new toxicity testing paradigm that will predict whether agricultural pesticides can lead to birth defects. Working with farmworkers in Eastern North Carolina, she is identifying how the genome is changed by occupational exposure to pesticides.





MJ Sharp
mj.sharp@duke.edu



MJ Sharp has been a documentary photographer and photojournalist for much of the last two decades, working primarily in North Carolina and her native Tennessee. She was the staff photographer at the Independent, an award-winning newsweekly in North Carolina, for most of the 1990s while also freelancing regionally for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Ford Foundation, among others. She went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 and has often been a visiting lecturer at area universities since that time. In recent years she began extensively photographing night landscapes with large-format bellows cameras. That work has been widely exhibited and appeared in Jill Waterman's book, Night and Low-Light Photography, as well as the French online arts journal Edit-Revue. With the support of investors she was able to travel to Scotland to shoot by moonlight in the winter of 2010. Recently, she has taken the long-exposure model indoors to explore common domestic scenes in extreme low-light conditions. Very long exposures, whether by moonlight or reflected hallway light, initiate a particular kind of visual vocabulary only possible with slowly accumulating light on film. That vocabulary, in turn, initiates a particular kind of discussion about what we habitually take time to see and experience and what we routinely overlook and disregard. Samples of her work are available online at www.mjsharp.com.

Read more about MJ Sharp on CDS Porch





Christopher Sims
csims@duke.edu



Christopher Sims has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and, at CDS, has coordinated the exhibition and awards programs. He currently designs and manages websites for CDS and its projects. His most recent exhibitions include shows at SF Camerawork, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His recent project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. He is represented by Ann Stewart Fine Art in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C., and Clark Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2010, he was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.

His work on the Web can be seen at http://www.chrissimsprojects.com.

Read more about Christopher Sims on CDS Porch

Sam Stephenson
sfs4@duke.edu



Sam Stephenson is a writer and director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies. Since 1997 his research his focused on the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, and he has published two books on the subject: Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (W. W. Norton in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2001) and W. Eugene Smith, a retrospective of Smith’s career (Phaidon Press, 2001). Stephenson is currently directing a multifaceted project about a loft building in Manhattan’s flower district that was a legendary haunt of jazz musicians 1954-1965. Recipient of a 2001–02 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is researching Eugene Smith’s extensive photographs and audiotapes of this jazz loft and has collected more than 300 oral histories of the surviving musicians.  His book, The Jazz Loft Project, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf and CDS in November 2009. He is also working on a biography of Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stephenson, a native of Washington, N.C., has degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. His teaching interests include narrative and documentary aspects of underground New York City and vernacular music and culture.

Read more about Sam Stephenson on CDS Porch






Charles Thompson
cdthomps@duke.edu



Charles Thompson, director of the undergraduate program at CDS, holds the faculty position of Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion. He holds a Ph.D. in religion and culture from UNC- Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies and Latin American studies. His particular interests in documentary work include oral history, ethnography, filmmaking, and community activism. A former farmer, he remains immersed in agricultural issues and works on issues affecting laborers within our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers. He is the author or editor of five books; his latest is Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World. He is also editor, with Melinda Wiggins, of The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Thompson is also the producer/director of three documentary films, including his latest, Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos, as well as The Guestworker and We Shall Not Be Moved.

Charles Thompson's work can be seen on the Web at http://cdthomps.com

Read more about Charles Thompson on CDS Porch





Timothy Tyson
timothy.tyson@duke.edu



Timothy B. Tyson, author of the much-acclaimed Blood Done Sign My Name and other award-winning books, is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Divinity School. Blood Done Sign My Name, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Christopher Award and the North Caroliniana Book Award, was the 2005 selection of the Carolina Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assigned to all new undergraduate students. Tyson’s previous book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (UNC Press, 1999) won the James Rawley Prize and was co-winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. He also co-edited, with David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (UNC Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Tyson was a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004–05. He is a North Carolina native and a graduate of Duke (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’94).

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Untitled, from the series Latino Pastimes—La Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape," taught by Professor Tom Rankin.