Presentations by Recipients of the Certificate in Documentary Studies

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Photo of slide lecture "Walker Evans at 100"

Two Evenings of Presentations by Recipients of the Certificate in Documentary Studies
Awarded by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Continuing Studies Program at Duke University

Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium
Reception to follow in the Juanita Kreps Gallery
1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham

Monday, June 6, 7 p.m.
Linda Booker, video
Michelle Faucher, video
Dr. TT. RaShon-Ste. Marquette, multimedia
Emma Raynes, audio
Erica Rothman, video
Miriam Sauls, video

Wednesday, June 8, 7 p.m.
Phoebe Salvator Brush, video
Catalina Cortes, video
Laura DeBar, film
Diana Greene, photo
Kate Joyce, multimedia
Lisa Waldo, video

The public is invited to view presentations of final projects by this term's graduates of the Certificate in Documentary Studies program, offered by the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in collaboration with the Duke University Continuing Studies. Bios of the certificate recipients and descriptions of their final projects, in the students' words, are listed below.

These evenings also offer a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the Certificate in Documentary Studies, a program that offers documentary courses in photography, audio, video, oral history, writing, and community work. Certificate students must complete a minimum of six courses, including an introduction to documentary studies methods and ethics and a capstone seminar, in which students complete and present their final projects.

Participants may also earn credit toward the certificate in weeklong summer intensive institutes at CDS. For more information on the certificate program, contact Dawn Dreyer, CDS Learning Outreach Director, at 919-660-3680 or dkdreyer@duke.edu.

PROJECTS AND PARTICIPANTS

Monday, June 6, 7 p.m.
Instructor: Randy Benson

Linda Booker
Millworker
One night in November 2003, Central Carolina Community College Theatre members set up a stage in an old empty mill building and told the story of textile workers in the Depression era through oral history dialogues and folk music. What was intended to be a one-time performance turned into a yearlong odyssey. The film Millworker will go beyond the performance to explore how this production took on a life of its own during 2004, won the hearts of critics and audiences across the state, and changed the lives of the performers in it.

After graduating from Florida State University with a degree in visual communications, Linda Booker was a graphic designer and art director for numerous publications in Florida and North Carolina for thirteen years. Since moving to Pittsboro eight years ago, she has become involved with several nonprofit organizations, including Family Violence & Rape Crisis Services (FVRC), Chatham Together, and Heads Up Therapeutic Riding. Most of her volunteer work has focused on fundraising, and in 2003 she coordinated the opening of Second Bloom, FVRC's thrift shop. Her most recent films, Clyde & Mikhail and Millworker, are about people in her community of Chatham County, where she constantly finds inspiration from an array of talented, artistic, and creative individuals.

Michelle Faucher
The Seekers 'n Me
An East-coast transplant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, explores the unlikely intersection of linguistics and the new-age/personal-growth culture. A personal narrative told with satire and sympathy.

Michelle Faucher lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has been studying at CDS since last spring. She will be running a film camp for teenage girls this summer, and looks forward to starting a new career teaching high school this fall.

Dr. TT. RaShon-Ste. Marquette
Fo Day: The Third Coming of the Spirit of FiYiYi
Mardi Gras, March 2004, represented the twentieth year, the second anniversary, and the third coming of the spirit of The FiYiYi. According to urban legend, The FiYiYi took possession of Chief Victor Harris and first appeared wearing a black suit on Mardi Gras Day 1984. Every ten years (1994, 2004) the spirit renews itself, creates another black suit, and parades through the community honoring the spirit of the warriors past. This act renews the spirit and strengthens the soul of the Mandingo Warriors, a community of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, to continue on for another decade. Fo Day: The Third Coming of the Spirit of FiYiYi, uses photography and video to document the preparation and presentation of The FiYiYi on Mardi Gras morning. This short piece visually captures the contained chaos as the chief and his entourage are prepared for presentation.

Dr. RaShon is a priest, scholar, and artist whose documentary work explores the rich complexity of African cultural realities with a focus on retentions and expressions of the ABIA clan.

Emma Raynes
Clyde's Critters
This documentary piece combines an audio narrative and a collaborative photography sculpture. The subject of the work is Clyde Jones, a chain-saw artist who makes critters in Bynam, North Carolina. The Chatham Arts Council will use the audio piece in conjunction with next year's Clyde Fest.

Emma Raynes is from Brookline, Massachusetts. She graduated last May from Bowdoin College in Maine, where she studied art history, photography, and sociology. She has worked on collaborative photography projects in Nepal and southern India.

Erica Rothman
Marguerite Gignoux
For more than twenty years Marguerite "Peg" Gignoux has been an educator and designer of art initiatives that have produced original textiles for public display in hospitals, libraries, and schools. As I have come to know Peg and her work, I see her as a textile documentarian. Her projects are based on life experience, community history, and collaborative experience. I am drawn to Peg's work for her beautiful sense of color and flow, and for her ability to transform feelings and events into three-dimensional art. In this short documentary, Peg and I explore how she has learned to use her art "to confront loss and disrepair."

Erica Rothman has been a psychotherapist for more than twenty years. Prior to becoming a certificate student at CDS, she produced two medical education documentaries on ethical issues at the end of life. Her experience in the certificate program has led to a career change, and in 2004 she started Nightlight Productions, a comprehensive video production company. Weaving her clinical skills with new production skills and a deeper understanding of documentary work has enabled her to pursue collaborative projects with nonprofits and local artists.

Miriam Sauls
Bishop Manning
In his early years, Dready Manning lived the life of a bluesman, taking his music from party to party and selling bootleg whiskey along the way. A miraculous healing following a mysterious illness resulted in his religious conversion in 1962, and he vowed never to live the life of a bluesman again. But rather than give up his music, he decided to use it to serve the Lord, walking away from the fame and fortune his talent and virtuosity might have brought him. Bishop Dready Manning started preaching and has brought his masterful singing, guitar picking, and harmonica playing to his congregation at St. Mark Holiness Church and radio stations around Halifax County, North Carolina, for four decades now.

Miriam Sauls is a writer and editor in Raleigh and has written features on the arts, education, religion, travel, and food. Her articles have appeared in various magazines and newspapers across North Carolina and the United States. She is also communications director for the Department of Theater Studies at Duke University. She leads small group trips to Haiti and is co-leading a writing/painting/cooking course in Paris next year. She has completed several documentaries
on Haiti. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has an M.A. in English from the University of Florida. She is married to Bruce Sauls, a software developer and a drummer in a rock-and-roll band and a gospel band. She has two children, Claire, 20, and Will, 16.

Wednesday, June 8, 7 p.m.
Instructor: Charlie Thompson

Phoebe Salvator Brush
spitty: a home movie
A short video snapshot of a father and his daughters making music, making family.

Phoebe Brush lives in Durham and is finally completing the certificate program after lolly-gagging for three years.

Catalina Cortes
Spaces Under Construction: Latino Itineraries in North Carolina
This video shows how Latino immigrants have been creating their own spaces in North Carolina. These spaces are in constant change and formation, and are essential for understanding the different dynamics of Latino immigration to the United States. Throughout the voices and spaces that narrate the story and highlight the complexity of Latino immigration, this documentary explores the experiences, contradictions, and dreams of immigrants.

Catalina Cortes Severino was born in Bogota, Colombia, with Colombian and Italian citizenship. She began her B.A in anthropology in Colombia and completed her degree at the University of Siena in Italy. She has done fieldwork both in Colombia and Italy in rural and urban areas and currently is interested in visual anthropology and cultural studies. In the fall, she will start the M.A. program in Communications Studies at UNC - Chapel Hill.

Laura DeBar
Dave Hager Went to Hollywood
A biographical documentary shot with Super 8 film. Charlotte native Dave Hager was discovered in North Carolina in the 1980s while working as an extra. He lived in Hollywood for twelve years, appearing in Double Jeopardy, October Sky, Catch Me If You Can, and other films. Hager recently returned to Charlotte, where he found his film career wasn't over, and has since starred in such locally shot productions as The Dale Earnhardt Story and Warm Springs. Dave shares his story, his opinions about the decline of the film industry in North Carolina, and how its potential return could save the local economy.

Laura DeBar has a background in photography, theater, and film studies. She was born and raised in Virginia and calls the Southeast and Northwest home.

Diana Greene
Divining Ada: A Search for Wonder
An exploration that began with a discovery. In 1999, I found the typed oral history of my great-grandmother, Ada Alden. The following quote has inspired and intrigued me, and put me on this path toward my certificate at CDS: "We have within us if we care to find it something that far transcends the workings of the loftiest brain. My creed is wonder."

"My creed is wonder" is at the heart of my search. Is wonder a verb, a noun, a mystical state, a state of innocence, a temporary encounter, or a stirring in the soul? Perhaps it is all of that, and more. I don't know; I wonder.

My exploration includes taped audio interviews with four people who are moved by the force of wonder, each in his or her own way. In addition, I photographed the subjects—a sculptor, a nun, a principal, and a composer—engaged in the activity that brings them in contact with wonder.

Diana Greene is an author, essayist, and emerging photographer. After earning an M.F.A. in fiction at Arizona State University, she moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1993. Since then she has taught writing at Salem College and in the public schools through the Arts-in-Education program. In addition, she is the commentator for "Voices and Viewpoints," a weekly program on National Public Radio station WFDD-FM. Her stories have appeared in several publications, including the Sun, the Independent, and Skirt! She was a writer and producer at Cable News Network in Atlanta, and her book, 79 Ways to Calm a Crying Baby, was published by Simon & Schuster.

Kate Joyce
Sight Insight: Mapping Grassland Phase II
Bloemfontein, South Africa, Summer 2004

Grassland Phase II is a government-subsidized settlement located on the fringe of Bloemfontein's expanding township border. In an effort to address the land and housing needs of people living in a rapidly growing informal settlement, former farmland was bought and divided into formal sites. Each site has access to electricity and communal water pumps. In 2003 more than two thousand families living in the informal settlement were relocated to these sites. While some people are busy upgrading their living structures to mud or cement brick, the majority of Grassland's residents live in shacks. The photographs, audio, and poetry from Grassland Phase II are a product of my placement in South Africa as a 2003-2004 Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative Fellow, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies.

The title of this presentation refers to the existence of formalized "shack-land" sites and my reliance on sight and visual representation, as reference points to think about development—geographically, communally, and personally. While Grassland Phase II is busy creating boundaries, the subsequent relationships and interactions built as a result of this project were busy crossing them. The photographs, poetry, and audio in this presentation create a map drawn from a perspective that followed a specific set of footsteps.

Kate Joyce was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With the creative and material support offered by friends and family around her, she has pursued photography ever since constructing her first pinhole camera for a seventh-grade science project. Upon graduation from high school she spent seven months traveling and photographing in Chile. She has also photographed in Iceland, Guatemala, Spain, and the American West. She studied Spanish in Guatemala and sociology and photojournalism in California at San Francisco State University. Kate is a photographer interested in the relationship between documentary processes and art, and in engaging with communities around her.

Lisa Waldo
The Women's Prison Repertory Company
This video project developed from writing workshops at the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women. In these workshops, inmates write about their lives both before prison and during their sentences, creating material to perform publicly throughout the Triangle. The objectives are multifold: to give voice to the women; to help in their assimilation to prison and in their eventual release; to speak to audience members who have had similar experiences; and to dispel myths and prejudices about incarcerated people.

Lisa Waldo moved to North Carolina from Seattle to complete the Certificate in Documentary Studies program. Her previous documentary work was as a photographer for a Seattle newspaper covering homelessness. The Women's Prison Repertory Company is her first video piece.

banner image:

Professor Alex Harris during a slide lecture accompanying the fall 2003 exhibition, Walker Evans at 100. Photograph by Christopher Sims.

Center for Documentary Studies
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705

telephone: (919) 660-3663
fax: (919) 681-7600
email: docstudies@duke.edu

See: directions to the Center for Documentary Studies

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