DocX Diaries: Reflections From Imani Dennison

Imani Dennison is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work explores memory, folklore and identity. They participated in the DocX Residency: Another World is Possible at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in spring 2025 — conceived by Stephanie Owens and Nyssa Chow as an invitation for documentary artists to connect, breathe and create. 

Below, Dennison reflects on this experience and time spent working on their multimedia project, “Mississippi Mud in Spring,” which reimagines a short story by their grandmother, Colia Liddell Clark, a civil rights activist whose life was tethered to the struggles of the American South. Through personal family archives, newsreels and newly shot footage, the film reconstructs the history of Mississippi from the 1940s to the 1980s, deploying a Black futurist framework to bridge divides between Dakar, Senegal, and the Gulf of Mississippi.                                                                       

This piece is part of our DocX Diaries series, with entries and insights from all the 2025 DocX fellows. 

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As I sit on my front porch, listening to the birds greet the sun, I sit in deep gratitude. This time spent as a Duke DocX fellow has been an invitation of many things: community, exploration, routine. It’s been incredibly nurturing and exactly what I needed. I’ve been going on walks, cooking daily, praying more and enjoying the joy in the mundane. 

“DocX gave me much needed time to co-conspire, counter and reimagine the possibility and responsibility of a working artist.” 

I’ve been able to process, bend, break and expand my ideas around cinema, art and histories, both personal and extended, while staying curious and understanding that this journey is lifelong. I’ve been building fires, exploring landscapes and making new connections that are all teaching me things. I’ve had time to move at a healthy pace and connect back to my body in ways I needed. Following my two-month residency in Dakar, Senegal, filming parts of “Mississippi Mud in Spring,” I feel thankful to have been met with such intention and inquiry. DocX gave me much needed time to co-conspire, counter and reimagine the possibility and responsibility of a working artist. 

Week Two: I decorated my office in CDS. I printed out images to paint the bare eggshell walls, decorated the empty wooden desk with photobooks, flipped to pages that most inspired me and typed a small list of ancestors that hung beside my desktop computer, reminding me of the names I carry with me every day. I made time to connect with professors like Nora Zubizarreta, who gave me a 16mm Bolex demo as a fellow celluloid film lover. It was through my time spent with her that I discovered Ava LaVonne Vineset, a professor of Dance. Following the sound of a djembe drum through the halls of the Rubenstein led me right inside her African Dance class where I was invited to participate. Since “Mississippi Mud in Spring” calls for a more embodied practice, I decided that there’s no better way than to be led in spirit like this. It felt so luscious moving slow, saying yes to things that feel good and being healthily spontaneous. 

“It was comforting to learn that we are all actually in conversation, making similar inquiries and negotiations.”  

The pace of my time in Durham, and the guest artists we were so graciously in community with during our time together, really opened up new pathways to the ideas of returning back to myself, shedding/dying, living and exploring further about what it means to keep true to what’s inside me. Listening to filmmakers like Rosine Mbakam speak about her journey with power, consent, and filming with family disrupted the stale information I had in my mind about what’s possible. Having such a critical lens regarding cinema and our position as storytellers felt right in conversation with other artists like Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese talking about disrupting the gaze, creating ancestral stories stretching the imagination far and wide. It was comforting to learn that we are all actually in conversation, making similar inquiries and negotiations. 

My project, “Mississippi Mud in Spring,” inspired by a short story authored by my late grandmother, Colia Liddell Lafayette Clark, creates a blank canvas to paint a story about Black migration, freedom, identity and waterways in the American South. It’s important that I give my personal work historical context, most excitedly rooted in myth-making. I’ve been spending time researching topics of magic, hoodoo, southern folklore, and reading about decolonizing my gaze. Through this research practice I’ve come across more Black performance artists exploring freedom through death, illusion and storytelling. I’ve been creating webs that weave my grandmother into this long lineage of artists, examining the strategies used to will themselves from rural southern states to other parts of the globe that had more access to imagination and worldbuilding. 

It's been such a dynamic time reading gifted text, pulling images for inspiration and having a cohort of thought partners to watch things in conjunction with sharing about our projects. 

Immense gratitude for Nyssa Chow and Stephanie Ownes for creating such an engaging space and allowing us to co-dream of possible futures.