Staff
Wesley Hogan
Director, Center for Documentary Studies
Wesley Hogan is the 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.
Whitney Baker
Web Design and Production Manager
Whitney is a writer, programmer and all-around multimedia storyteller with a passion for local, community-driven stories. She received a bachelor's in multimedia journalism and Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, where she was also able to experience the glorious life of a theater technician, travel through South America and learn to make balloon animals.
Brittany Barbee
Emerging Documentary Artist, Documentary Diversity Project
Brittany was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. She is a lover of all forms of art. The motto she stands by is, “Anything arts is who I am, and anything arts is who I’ll always be.” She is a self- taught musician. At the age of nine, music sparked her interest, specifically percussion.
Samantha Bechtold
Documentary Arts and Publishing Intern
Samantha Bechtold is the documentary arts and publishing intern at the Center for Documentary Studies. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a BA in journalism, where she served as editor-in-chief of her university's yearbook, Sooner.
Michelle Benham
Director of Marketing, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Michelle Benham is the marketing director at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
Michael Betts II
Graduate Assistant, DocX
Michael Betts is a student in the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program at Duke University (’20) and a graduate assistant working on the DocX lab’s experimental site, CDS Shortwave.
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.
Greg Britz
Associate Director for Operations and Finance
Greg Britz is the Associate Director for Operations and Finance at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS) where he has worked for the past 22 years. An interdisciplinary educational organization affiliated with Duke University, the Centre for Documentary Studies offers a variety of programs that connect the arts and humanities to fieldwork, drawing upon documentary methods of photography, filmmaking, oral history, folklore, and writing as catalysts for education and change. In his role as Associate Director, Greg manages all financial aspects of CDS, along with oversight of HR, physical plant, legal and tax aspects of CDS operations.
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.
Steven Cheek
Emerging Documentary Artist, Documentary Diversity Project
Steven describes some of his skills and interests: “I love to cook a lot of foods that I believe most people my age don’t know how to cook.
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.
Amber Delgado
Exhibitions Intern
Amber Nicole Delgado recently completed her undergraduate studies at East Carolina University where she received a BFA in film/media production and a BA in art history.
Alexa Dilworth
Publishing Director and Senior Editor
Alexa Dilworth is publishing director and senior editor at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, where she also directs the awards program, which includes the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, the CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Writing and Photography, and the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize.
Christopher Everett
Communications Manager, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Christopher Everett is the communications manager of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. He is a film director, film producer, social media specialist and graphic artist from Laurinburg, North Carolina.
Gail Exum
Business Manager
Gail Exum is the business manager for the Center for Documentary Studies and the MFA/EDA. She came to CDS from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, formally Doc Arts, Inc., where she had been business manager since 2007.
Mara Guevarra
Digital Marketing and Projects Manager
As Digital Marketing and Projects Manager, Mara works in social media management and digital content creation as part of the Center for Documentary Studies’ Communications Team. She is particularly interested in using immersive technology in order to document the future and propose new realities.
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.
Deirdre Haj
Director, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Engaging with local business leaders, Deirdre attracted the creation of the Full Frame Theater and its new offices. Deirdre implemented free monthly community screenings, and the A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy discussion venue.
Alex Harris
Professor of the Practice/Hine Fellows
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 has taught at Duke for more than three decades through the Sanford School, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts Program.
Rahi Hasan
Continuing Education Coordinator
Rahi is an educator, organizer and multimedia artist, experimenting with ways to shift the power held by filmmakers over to the communities being recorded.
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.
Aaron Kutnick
UI+UX Designer, DocX
Aaron Kutnick received his MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. He currently works as a digital content creator and user experience designer in the DocX Documentary Lab at the Center for Documentary Studies. He also teaches courses in experimental interface design and computational media. His work asks what ethnographic fieldwork looks like within the virtual spaces of the internet, and what kind of tools are best suited to meaningfully engage this rich, dynamic realm of cultural production.
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.
Savannah Lennertz
Senior Development Associate, Full Frame Documentary Festival
Savannah Lennertz is the senior development associate for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where she is responsible for sponsorships, grants, and individual giving.
Xaris A. Martínez
Assistant to the Director
Xaris (pronounced HA-ri'z) A. Martínez is the assistant to the director of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University.
Danita Mason-Hogans
Project Coordinator, Critical Oral Histories
Danita Mason-Hogans is a native of Chapel Hill NC for seven generations on both sides of her family. She is a curriculum specialist with a theater arts background and has been an education activist for thirty years. She is employed with the Center for Documentary Studies where she serves as Program Manager for the Critical Oral Histories Component. Her current projects involve working with veteran Civil Rights activists in order to document their experiences and transform them into K-12 Civil Rights components. She was the organizer for the national 2015 One Person One Vote voting rights conference and works with school systems, universities, activists and historians to document local and national history from the “inside out” and from the “bottom up”.
Quadiriah McCullough
Operations Coordinator
Quadiriah McCullough has been the operations coordinator at CDS since 2014. She oversees CDS’s physical plant and logistics at the Boiler Room event space and Full Frame Theater at American Tobacco.
Lynn McKnight
Associate Director for Programs and Development
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.
Paul A. Newman Jr.
Emerging Documentary Artist, Documentary Diversity Project
Paul is a Connecticut-born, North Carolina–bred artist.
William Page
Coordinator, Documentary Diversity Project
William is a proud Durham native and self-described book nerd (come talk with him about Octavia Butler!). At CDS, he coordinates the Documentary Diversity Project (DDP), an effort to promote greater racial diversity and equity within the documentary arts. His responsibilities include coordinating support for emerging and more-established documentary artists from marginalized groups enhancing their portfolios while in residence at CDS.
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.
Liz Phillips
Communications Director
Elizabeth (Liz) Phillips is communications director at the Center for Documentary Studies. This is her second stint at CDS; in 1993, while working as a writer/editor at a government-issue government job in D.C., a friend told her about a new magazine starting up at a place called the Center for Documentary Studies.
Angie Potiny
Development Assistant
Angie Potiny is the Development Assistant for both CDS and Full Frame. She received her degree in Communications and Women’s Studies from UNC-CH.
Courtney Reid-Eaton
Exhibitions Director / Creative Director, Documentary Diversity Project
Courtney Reid-Eaton is a culture worker, creative engine, spouse, mother, and Black Feminist. She has been the exhibitions director at CDS since 2001, overseeing the selection, scheduling, curation, design, and installation of exhibits in all of the Center’s galleries and organizing related public programs; she also serves as the creative director of CDS’s pilot Documentary Diversity Project.
Kate Rogers
Programming Coordinator, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Kate Rogers joined Full Frame as programming coordinator in October 2016 and is responsible for managing the submission process, the selection committee process, print traffic, and awards juries.
Sherrill Roland
2018–19 Post-MFA Fellow in the Documentary Arts
Roland is a North Carolina native—born in Asheville and currently living in Raleigh—who received a BFA in design and MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. As he describes his work, Roland “creates art that challenges ideas around controversial social and political constructs, and generates a safe space to process, question, and share.”
Lani Simeona
Production Co-Director, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Lani Simeona is the Production Co-Director for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Lani joined the Full Frame team in 2007 as Office Manager, became the Artist Services Coordinator and Communications Manager in 2011, and Production Co-Director in 2014. As Production Co-Director, she is responsible for festival and year-round ticketing, volunteer selection and training, filmmaker transportation and lodging, venue selection and build out, and technical and IT support. Prior to Full Frame, Lani studied film and theater at Florida State University and the University of Central Florida, was a tour guide and trainer for the Walt Disney World Resort, and spent 10 years in music retail management, merchandising, and music buying before making the move from Florida to Durham, 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.
Ashley Solesbee
Education Coordinator, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Ashley Solesbee is the education coordinator at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Ashley is responsible for Full Frame’s Teach the Teachers Professional Development program, the School of Doc Summer Program for high school students, and the annual Youth Screening event at the Carolina Theatre. Ashley is also part of the pilot partnership with PBS’s POV program, where she will be hosting a webinar on how to successfully integrate documentary film in the classroom.
Laurids Sonne
Photography and Digital Arts Associate
Laurids Andersen Sonne is a Danish interdisciplinary artist. Laurids’ work spans film, video, installation, sculpture, performance and socially engaged art. Laurids sees art as
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.
Sadie Tillery
Artistic Director, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Sadie Tillery is the artistic director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Sadie joined the programming department in 2005 and became director in 2008.
April Walton
Continuing Education Director
April Walton is director of continuing education at the Center for Documentary Studies. She has worked at CDS for over fifteen years, starting as night manager. Growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, April was drawn to the stories of real people told through oral histories, regional music, and materials.
Greg Weaver II
Emerging Documentary Artist, Documentary Diversity Project
Greg is a skateboarder, photographer, and writer.
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.