Instructors
Wesley Hogan
Director, Center for Documentary Studies
Wesley Hogan is Director of 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.
Kelly Alexander
Lecturing Fellow
Kelly Alexander is a writer and an anthropologist based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Bill Bamberger
Lecturing Fellow
Bill Bamberger’s work explores large cultural and social issues of our time: the demise of the American factory, housing in America, adolescents coming of age in an inner-city high school. His book with Cathy N.
John Biewen
Audio Program Director/Instructor
John Biewen is audio program director at CDS and host of the Center’s audio documentary podcast, Scene on Radio. During a thirty-year career as a public radio journalist and documentary-maker, he has told stories from forty American states and from Europe, Japan, and India.
Marie T. Cochran
Fall 2020–Spring 2021 Lehman Brady Professor
Born and raised in Toccoa, Georgia, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Marie T. Cochran is an artist, educator and writer. As a self-described cultural pollinator, she uses visual art to convene partnerships that ignite collaboration.
Von Diaz
Spring 2020 Lehman Brady Professor
Von Diaz is a writer, documentary producer, and author of Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South (University Press of Florida, 2018).
Lana Garland
Instructor
Lana Garland has worked as a Creative Director, Director, and Writer/Producer in television and film in the US and Europe. Her work has included content for HBO, BET, and ESPN in America, and TV2 in Denmark.
Jaki Shelton Green
Instructor
Jaki Shelton Green is a writer and poet, a North Carolina native whose publications include Dead on Arrival, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Masks, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Blue Opal (a play), and Feeding the Light.
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.
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.
Nancy Kalow
Lecturing Fellow
Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker. She was a co-convener, with miriam cooke and Maha Houssami, of the Humanities Writ Large project, Arab Refugee Oral History: Collecting Life Narratives.
Michelle Lanier
Lecturing Fellow
An Afro-Carolinian folklorist, Michelle Lanier has been an instructor at CDS since 2000. Michelle is the first person of color to direct the 25 sites, battlefields, and museums of the N.C. Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. She also served as the founding executive director of North Carolina’s African American Heritage Commission.
Barbara Lau
Instructor
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.
Lisa McCarty
Curator of the Archives of Documentary Arts, Instructor
Lisa McCarty’s work as a photographer, filmmaker, curator, and educator is driven by her interest in the origins of photography. She is particularly interested in how technology influences image production, as well as the material and associative evolution of images.
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.
Elena Rue
Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow 2005-2006, Project Manager, Instructor
Elena Rue completed the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) Certificate program offered in conjunction with Duke Continuing Studies.
Margaret Sartor
Instructor
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.
MJ Sharp
Lecturing Fellow
MJ Sharp is a documentary and fine arts photographer based in North Carolina.
Christopher Sims
Director of Undergraduate Education/Lecturing Fellow, 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.
Charlie Thompson
Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies
Charles D. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A common thread through his work is a deep concern for people doing their all to have a voice in our agricultural systems.
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.
