Six Documentary Artists Coming to Duke for the DocX Residency–Another World is Possible

Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies announces the cohort chosen to participate in the 2025 DocX Residency–Another World is Possible, created by Stephanie Owens and Nyssa Chow. The residency is an invitation for documentary artists working across disciplines to take space to breathe and create.

Gathering at Duke from March 18 through April 18 and coinciding with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 3-6), four individual fellows and one team of two fellows will be awarded $20,000 to support their projects in a pivotal stage of late development or production.

Fellows will participate in community-building sessions with Owens, Chow and guest artists, before diving into their independent projects. In the following weeks, fellows will focus on their projects, engage with Duke students and take part in Full Frame. At the end of the residency, fellows will participate in a public roundtable discussion and contribute a written piece about their practice.

Duke Faculty Opportunity for Student Engagement

Submit a proposal to engage students with DocX Residency Fellows during the period of March 18 – April 18. Faculty whose proposals are accepted will have $1,000 deposited in their research funds. The deadline is January 31, 2025.

Fellows of the DocX Residency–Another World is Possible 

Imani Dennison

Imani Dennison is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work explores memory, folklore and identity. Rooted in Black speculative storytelling, their practice spans film, sound and installation, reimagining southern narratives and Black futures. Dennison has created commissioned works for PBS, Tribeca, ITVS and Procter & Gamble. As a 2022 Tribeca Queen Collective Directing Program grantee, they directed Bone Black: Midwives vs. the South, an award-winning creative nonfiction film.

Project

Mississippi Mud in Spring is a multimedia project that traces the currents of memory, displacement and longing, reimagining the short story of Colia Liddell Clark, a civil rights activist whose life was tethered to the struggles of the American South. Through the interplay of 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 the temporal and spatial divides between Dakar, Senegal, and the Gulf of Mississippi. At its center is a timekeeper whose movements and rituals carve a pathway between past and present, liberation and return. The film interweaves the whimsical and the real, creating a speculative world where resistance is not only an act of survival but a practice of imagining what was stolen and what remains. Mississippi Mud in Spring asks: What histories are inscribed in the body, etched in skin? How does nature bear witness to Black histories? What fragments have been kept, and what has been lost? This project transforms the archive through a Black speculative framework and reimagines the geographies of the American South.

Arielle Knight

Director Arielle Knight is a New York- and Mexico-based documentary filmmaker and creative producer. Mining the absurd, the mythological and the mundane, her practice seeks to center and recover the multiplicity of Black experiences and the narrative possibilities therein. Through her own filmmaking practice and in collaboration with like- minded creators, Knight aims to inundate the world with the dreams, visions and beauty of Black lives on screen.

Project

And Counting is a multipart essay film that that explores Black love and intimacies mediated by technological interventions. Inspired by bell hooks’ foundational writing, All About Love, the project centers Black love as transcendent resistance, connecting disparate visual threads, ecstatic expressions of spirituality, dance, prayer and community.

Emily Mkrtichian and Kamee Abrahamian

Emily Mkrtichian is a filmmaker and multimedia artist whose work is deeply influenced by her upbringing in a displaced, diasporic family. She explores radically personal and alternative archives, focusing on the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region while emphasizing the transformative power of ethical, collaborative storytelling. Her debut feature documentary, There Was, There Was Not, won the FIPRESCI Prize (International Critics Award) at the Golden Apricot Film Festival.

Kamee Abrahamian is a queer SWANA artist, storyteller, producer, mother, waitress and witch whose work summons ancestral reclamation, diasporic futurism and justice. Their creative practice is collaborative, rooted in relational ethics of care and oriented toward generative, visionary world-building. Abrahamian’s projects have been supported by organizations across Canada, the U.S. and Armenia. Abrahamian is also a Pushcart-nominated writer, literary alumni at VONA and Banff Center for Arts, and Lambda-awarded theater maker.

Project

The Artsakh Archive is a project to collect an archive of the displaced people of Artsakh and create a feature length film exploring the collection. It includes audio oral histories, satellite imagery (past and present), film footage of the (con)temporary homes of displaced families, and the objects they brought with them from their lost homeland. It takes the embodied experience of displacement as a starting point to map material and immaterial territories of home, memory, movement and loss, making the assembly of a radically personal archive a ritual oriented toward the shared reconstruction of memory and the reclamation of joy.

J Wortham

J Wortham is a writer, oral historian, reiki practitioner and sound healer living in Brooklyn. They are the coeditor of the art anthology Black Futures and are working on a book about the body and dissociation called Work of Body.

Project

Riis Beach: Being visibly queer used to be a sign of pride. Now it feels like a target. Where can we be ourselves? My project is a visual oral history of Riis Beach in Queens, New York. Riis Beach has long been a site for the celebration of queerness, a beacon of Black radical imagination and a sanctuary where marginalized communities have reclaimed joy and freedom. All that said, what makes a beach queer? It has to do with how the space is shaped by the bodies and politics that populate it. It has to do with history, legacy and time. As one elder told me for the oral history project that I’ve been doing on this beach: “It was one thing to be ourselves under the cloak of night, and another to be ourselves in the shining bright of the day.” At the heart of this film is the fundamental question of freedom. What is it? What does it mean? And what does it feel like to taste it for a weekend, or even an afternoon?

Dominic Yarabe

Dominic Yarabe is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work has screened at numerous festivals, including Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival where she won the Artistic Vision award, New Orleans Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Doc10 Film Festival and more. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. 

Project

Feu de Lune (working title) is a hybrid docufiction feature film exploring West African mythology, gendered childhood dreams and the palimpsests of wartime through two young twins in a rural village in West Africa.

The DocX Residency–Another World is Possible is the third iteration of the DocX initiative that began in 2021 with the DocX Archive Lab–How Are We Known? and continued with last spring’s DocX Development Lab–Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures.

See the call for proposals to engage with these fellows and learn more about DocX.