2017 Storytellers' Institute: Looking Back
Betty Yu, Simon Klein and Adam Tinkle work in Lib 113
The 2017 Storytellers’ Institute brought together a talented group of documentarians to engage with the theme of Space and Place. Our eight Skidmore student fellows, two Skidmore faculty fellows and five professional documentary visiting fellows shared an intense five weeks of creation, critique, learning and fellowship.
Highlights include the 2017 Festosium, which brought together international documentary storytellers, artists, activists, scholars and the Skidmore/Saratoga community for four days of back-to-back programming and discussion about space and place in documentary storytelling.
The Appalachian Mountain Patrol's drone "
workshop
This year we had exciting workshops led by visiting documentarians in using drone technology for documentary activism and oral history methodology. As well, students led excellent workshops in virtual reality and animation techniques.
Among the many fascinating projects to come out of the Storytellers’ Institute this year is faculty member Diana Bryson Barnes’s short radio documentary about an undocumented farmworker, which aired on the NPR show 51% in July.
Fellows gather for a weekly community dinner in the Dining Hall.
—Sarah Friedland, director of the Storytellers’ Institute