CDS Announces 2018–2019 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows

The Center for Documentary Studies is pleased to introduce the 2018-2019 Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows, all of whom will be working with community-based organizations in New York City; scroll down for more information on Elliott Golden, Liv Linn, Annabel Manning, and Chandler Phillips. Founded on the spirit, values, and actions of social documentary photographer Lewis Hine, CDS’s Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program connects the talents of young documentarians with community organizations to generate collaborative and community-focused documentary work. Learn more on the program’s blog, and enjoy the Hine Fellows website by former Hine Fellow Natalie Minik that revisits five Hine Fellowship projects during the program’s seven years of working with organization’s in Boston—Hine-Sight.org.

Elliott Golden

Still image from It’s Not Cuba, It’s Red by Elliott Golden
Still image from It’s Not Cuba, It’s Red by Elliott Golden

Elliott Golden is a photographer and documentary filmmaker from Princeton, New Jersey. He is a recent graduate of Duke University with a BA in Global Cultural Studies and a certificate in Documentary Studies.

Elliott spent much of his undergraduate career studying the intersection of cultural theory and artistic practice. His documentary capstone film, “It’s Not Cuba, It’s Red,” supported by the John Hope Franklin Award, documented the work of contemporary artists in Havana and their views on the relationship between art, creativity, and the landscape of late socialist Cuba. His senior thesis, “Smoking’s Hereafter: Theorizing Post-Cigarette America,” winner of the Bascom Headen Palmer Literary Prize, contextualized the advent of the electronic cigarette and its media representation within the long saga of America’s love affair with tobacco, nicotine, and the photographic image.

In between the other stuff of life, Elliott enjoys playing basketball and guitar with friends, both at a middling level.

“I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work and learn in the Hine Fellowship’s tradition of socially minded documentary. This is a tremendous chance to develop a practice committed to collaborative expression and community engagement.”

Elliott will be working with the West Brooklyn Community Highschool, one of Good Shepherd Services‘ Partnership Schools.

Liv Linn

Still image from Autodefensa by Liv Linn
 Still image from Autodefensa by Liv Linn

Liv Linn graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018 with a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies. As a Robertson Scholar, she was able to explore her love of storytelling and what she would eventually call documentary writing at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Once there, that love quickly developed into an ardent belief in the power of stories both to reflect and shape culture and to propel social change.

As a student of both documentary and feminism, Liv has investigated a variety of subjects—Black student activism at the University of North Carolina, the Matagalpan women’s antiviolence movement in Nicaragua, her own lineage and whiteness, queer bodies—through as many mediums, including audio documentary, oral history, documentary poetry, and zines. Much of her work is born from collaborations with community organizations, primarily the Southern Oral History Program, Compass Center for Women and Families, and Colectivo de Mujeres Matagalpa.

I was drawn to the Hine Fellowship not only by its position at the intersection of storytelling and social change, but also by its emphasis on critically navigating the ethics of documentary work. I am grateful for the chance to develop my passions for these things with the support of the Fellowship. My hope is to honor this opportunity and the work of the Staten Island Justice Center by creating pieces “with” rather than “about” individuals and communities they serve, working with them to tell their own stories.

Annabel Manning

Jail Arts Initiative workshop, by Annabel Manning
Jail Arts Initiative workshop, by Annabel Manning

Born in Mexico and raised there and in South America, Annabel Manning works as an artist mostly with Latinx communities, especially the undocumented. She is encouraged by the resurgence of social-practice art, because it provides models for artmaking in conjunction with community building. Her role as a social-practice artist is shaped by the needs of the communities with whom she collaborates to find ways for individuals to represent themselves, whether in pre-schools, schools, hospitals, art centers, or jails. In 2011, she helped to create a Spanish-language “Jail Arts Initiative” at two Charlotte-Mecklenburg County (NC) Jails in collaboration with the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office. For the past four years, she also organized, with the Community School of the Arts in Charlotte (NC), a bilingual art and literacy program for Latinx families and their preschooler children.

Annabel uses photography, video, printmaking, painting, poetry, music, and other tools while interacting with individuals expressing their experiences with economic and physical hardships as they struggle for recognition, respect, and rights in society. In particular, individuals explore the doubling of identity they experience, as they describe it: they often feel invisible in public where they aren’t respected, yet they’re clearly visible when with their families and other Latinx community members. In the end, the aim of Annabel’s art projects is to render the undocumented visible in their predicament of feeling invisible and visible at the same time in their everyday lives.

A Lewis Hine Fellowship at the Harlem Community Justice Center will give Annabel an opportunity to deepen her work as an artist with the Latinx community, this time back in New York City where she first began working with these communities.

To see some of Annabel’s work, visit http://www.annabelmanning.com/

Chandler Phillips

 Photograph from Black Boys Rest by Chandler Phillips
Photograph from Black Boys Rest by Chandler Phillips

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” Psalm 119:105

Chandler Phillips is a visual storyteller from Lawrenceville, Georgia. Raised with roots in the South and the West Indies, she is deeply interested of stories of Blackness, womanhood, and communities that have historically been overlooked and misrepresented.

Chandler’s work focuses on concepts of identity, grappling with truths and identities existing within ourselves that are waiting for a chance to find reconciliation through release. She sees documentary as a chance to work with others, leaving space for all parties to share those truths. Chandler appreciates interweaving stories, as this process shows how our histories are interconnected. Her aim is to reveal the many ways we can learn from those around us; to see that songs with different lyrics often share the same tune, as well to recognize how starkly different those tunes and lyrics can be. These stories are often the words and images that embody who we are when our bodies do not have the capability, the protection, or the privilege to do so.

Chandler is continuously looking for ways to step out of the visual constraints of traditional work, in order to reflect to magical realism that lives within our minds and conceptions of self. We consume stories every day, why not choose to take in something real, something raw, something beautiful and wrapped in possibility for something more.

Chandler graduated from Duke in 2018, majoring in Sociology with a certificate in Documentary Studies. She was given her first taste of storytelling in Traditions in Documentary Studies. This interest spiraled into filming and producing four short documentary films; working with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival; becoming a summer fellow of the Center; and, nearest to her heart, co-founding an online publication, the Bridge, at Duke and the University of Chapel Hill, which celebrates the creative talents of Black and Latinx women of over 100 students. She is immensely grateful for what she’s experienced and what is to come.

This year, she has the great honor of working with Hunts Points Alliance for Children through the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellowship: “The Hine Fellowship is an incredible opportunity that combines my love for the community and for the creative. I will be learning from remarkable community advocates who put their hearts into this work while also having the space and support to push myself creatively. I am beyond grateful and blessed for this fellowship.”

You can see some of Chandler’s work on her website.