Spreading MDOCS
English major Sara Marsh ’18 has taken several classes in Skidmore’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, and has enjoyed them so much that she plans to go to film school after graduation. She recently produced a short video on fellow MDOCS student Caleb Weiss ’18, who hopes to pursue a self-determined major in documentary film and says MDOCS has been a “huge part of my Skidmore experience.”
Marsh herself just won a $500 grant from the New York 6 consortium of colleges to produce a Skidmore video series. As a NY6 Think Tank fellow, she’s planning to shoot and edit five student day-in-the-life pieces this spring.
Says Marsh, “Not enough students know about MDOCS. I hope this Documentary at Skidmore College video can help more students get interested and the program will grow.” And Weiss’s hope: “that Skidmore continues to push the MDOCS program to include more classes. I would love for documentary studies to become its own department.”
According to MDOCS’s director, history professor Jordana Dym, some 50 students took MDOCS-affiliated courses this fall, and nearly 100 signed up for spring. Also this fall, around 500 attended events such as screenings, exhibitions, and workshops.
MDOCS was established in 2014 to help students tell stories that matter across the disciplines, through documentary arts from film to sound to exhibition to multimedia storytelling.
