People
Opeyemi Olukemi
Director
Throughout her career as an interactive producer, funder, and public programmer, Opeyemi has created spaces and pipelines for interdisciplinary artists, communities, and creative teams to experiment and create meaningful innovative content.
Harlan Campbell
Photography and Digital Arts Associate
Harlan Campbell is the photography and digital arts associate at the Center for Documentary Studies. He has a degree in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Allen Creech
Systems Administrator
Allen Creech has been a systems administrator for the the past eighteen years, thirteen of them at the Center for Documentary Studies. He also serves in that capacity for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and for Duke's MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program. Originally from Cary, North Carolina, Allen is a graduate of North Carolina State University.
Jamila R. Davenport
Operations Specialist
Jamila R. Davenport is an emerging multimedia documentarian who shares narratives digitally across internet platforms.
Kelsey Favret
Assistant Director of Development
Kelsey Favret (she/her/hers) is the assistant director of development at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), where she is responsible for the planning, coordination, and implementation of comprehensive annual giving, engagement, and stewardship programs.
Emily Foster
Associate Interim Festival Director; Marketing Director, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Emily Foster is the Marketing Director at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Before joining Full Frame, she held the position of Communications & Press Manager at Milwaukee Film.
Jaki Shelton Green
Instructor
Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina, is the first African American and third woman to be named to the post; she was appointed in 2018 and reappointed for a second term in 2021 by Governor Roy Cooper.
Mike Gulley
Development Director
Mike Gulley is the development director at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). He has more than eighteen years of experience and expertise in nonprofit fundraising, organizational growth, and relationship management. Mike has helped to grow capacity and fundraise for a number of organizations both here in the Triangle and also during his time living in California’s Bay Area.
Alex Harris
Professor Emeritus
Alex Harris is a photographer, writer, and teacher. He has photographed for extended periods in Cuba, the Inuit villages of Alaska, the Hispanic villages of northern New Mexico, and across the American South. He taught at Duke for almost forty years through the Sanford School, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts Program until his retirement (professor emeritus) in summer 2019.
Gary Hawkins
Lecturing Fellow
Gary Hawkins is a writer and filmmaker whose work traverses many genres, fiction and nonfiction, experimental and traditional, finding its expression in a variety of forms – essay, prose, installation and cinema.
Wesley Hogan
Instructor
Wesley Hogan is an undergraduate instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history and oral history.
Katie Hyde
Lecturing Fellow
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.
Jonathan Jensen
Board of Directors, Co-Chair
Jonathan Jensen has been a serial entrepreneur in media, real estate, and energy, and is currently trading commodities and managing an asset portfolio while taking time off to raise his two young sons with his wife, Amy.
Caitlin Margaret Kelly
Director, Power Plant Gallery
Caitlin Margaret Kelly is an artist, runner, and devout coffee drinker. She is Director of the Power Plant Gallery at Duke University.
EB Landesberg
Program Director, Hine Fellows
Elizabeth (EB) Landesberg is a filmmaker, multimedia artist and educator. In addition to co-directing the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, she is a producer and facilitator for Another Kind of Girl Collective, an expanding global media collective for young women living in displaced communities.
Michelle Lanier
Lecturing Fellow, CDS Courses Instructor
An AfroCarolina folklorist, Michelle Lanier has been an instructor at CDS since 2000. Michelle is the first person of color to direct the twenty-five sites, battlefields, and museums of the NC Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. She also served as the founding executive director of North Carolina’s African American Heritage Commission.
Barb Lee
Board of Directors, Co-Chair
Barb Lee is the founder and President of both Point Made Films, a documentary film company that focuses on American identity, and Point Made Learning, a consulting company that, using the stories of Point Made
S. Charmaine McKissick-Melton
Board of Directors
S. Charmaine McKissick-Melton is associate professor and former interim chair in the Department of Mass Communication at North Carolina Central University, and a 2017–18 NCCU-Duke Digital Humanities Fellow.
Lynn McKnight
Strategic Advisor
After a career in journalism, Lynn McKnight returned to her Duke alma mater in 1998 to join the CDS team building a dynamic place devoted to the documentary arts.
First serving as communications director, over the years she added external relations, program planning and management, and development to her duties. She has degrees from Duke University (public policy) and the University of Mississippi (southern studies) and has completed graduate studies in communications at the University of Florida.
Leesa Moore
Development Manager, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Leesa Moore joins our Full Frame family as our new Development Manager. Leesa was born and raised in Durham, and majored in Film and Media Communications at North Carolina State University.
Julie Morris
Board of Directors
Julie Morris is a longtime leader and advocate for the arts nationwide. Splitting her time between Raleigh and Los Angeles, she became involved with CDS and Full Frame in 2015 and is currently a member of the Full Frame Advisory Board.
Stephanie Owens
DocX Director
Stephanie Owens' background stretches from creator to curation. Her experience as a filmmaker, photographer, and film festival programmer has equipped her with insight into various forms of storytelling and the multifaceted needs of filmmakers and artists.
Dan Partridge
Production Co-Director, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Dan Partridge is the production co-director for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. He has served as the research associate for the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies, beginning in 2003. From 2000–2002, he was the CDS exhibitions and public programs assistant.
Susie Post-Rust
Lecturing Fellow
Post-Rust has taught at Duke since 2006. Her courses enable Duke Students to engage with the community outside university. She works to impart the experience of producing in-depth visual storytelling to her students. Most of her courses are service learning and involve a component of giving back to the community.
Karen Price
Instructor
In addition to teaching, Price directs the Duke in Los Angeles undergraduate semester away program. She received an MFA in production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, an MA in creative writing and English from Hollins University, and an AB in English and political science from Duke.
Tom Rankin
Professor of the Practice/Director, MFAEDA
Tom Rankin is Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University where he directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. For 15 years he was director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Rankin is formerly Associate Professor of Art and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and Chair of the Art Department at Delta State University.
Benjamin D. Reese Jr.
Board of Directors
Benjamin D. Reese Jr. is President of BENREESE, LLC. , a global diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm.
Christopher Sims
Undergraduate Education Director/Associate Professor of the Practice, Fall 2017 Lehman Brady Fellow
Christopher Sims is the Undergraduate Educator Director at the Center for Documentary Studies and a Lecturing Fellow in Documentary Arts. 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, awards, and web programs.
Shameeka Thomas
Night Manager
Shameeka Thomas is a night manager (front desk attendant) and event manager at the Center for Documentary Studies. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with a Master of Business Administration degree in 2013. She also has a Bachelor of Science degree with an emphasis in IT.
Tim Tyson
Senior Research Scholar
Timothy B. Tyson is senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
David Wong
Accounting Specialist
David is responsible for various accounting functions at CDS: paying vendors, paying employees, booking credit card receipts, depositing checks, and the like. He is a grad- uate of the University of Virginia with a degree in music, and by meanderings came to administrative work.