The 2016 Pool Movie Project Summer Arts Lab was a seven-week community-oriented documentary media lab, which I designed and directed.  It was funded by Haverford College’s John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.  The lab engaged community members, students, advisors, and field experts in a collaborative design process for the engagement campaign, website, and web content of my multi-platform documentary-in-progress Pool Movie (working title).

This was an ambitious interdisciplinary media project, completed in 2013-2014.  The idea originated when I proposed community media artist jesikah maria ross for a Mellon Creative Residency at Haverford College.  We were joined by Associate Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Helen White in planning and carrying out the project.  We wanted to draw upon jesikah’s expertise in socially engaged art to build connections among disciplines and with local communities. 

This project brought together jesikah, the three faculty members, and community partner the Delaware Riverkeeper, along with over 50 Haverford and Bryn Mawr College students, from four courses, across three academic divisions.  Our aim was to explore the causes and impacts of different kinds of waste present in the Delaware River.  The students focussed on the methodology of their own discipline, while also learning about how other disciplines approached the topic.  Chemistry students collected samples to determine the presence of chemicals from various waste products, Political Science students traced the waste to globalized production processes and mapped social and ecological implications, and Documentary students explored diverse ways of representing the theme of waste on screen. 

At semester’s end, the Chemistry and Political Science students completed data visualization projects about their research, while the Documentary students made short films.  Jesikah curated all the materials onto a Tumblr site.  The following semester, we did another phase of the work, holding a one-day mobile media lab, during which the Delaware Riverkeeper’s community partners took students to three waste sites to document them with photos, audio, and video.  This material too was curated onto the Tumblr site.

In Fall 2013, I proposed a pilot model for a documentary fellowship at Haverford College.  I developed the idea with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Helen White.  Helen was engaged in ongoing research along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico about the long-term impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizons oil spill.  Each summer she and her students collected samples from Gulf Coast beaches for later analysis at her lab at Haverford.  Over the course of ten weeks in Summer 2014, four student filmmaking Fellows engaged with Helen’s research, travelled to the Gulf Coast, and researched, developed, and completed a short film titled WAKE, with advisory, logistical, and creative support from Helen and myself.  WAKE explores changing environmental and human conditions in the Gulf, post-spill and post-Katrina.

The project offered documentary production students an opportunity to develop their skills in a real-world setting; built interdisciplinary connections between students and faculty members; and linked faculty research to the local community where that research takes place.  The Fellowship was generously supported by all three Centers at the College – the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (CPGC), the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for Arts and Humanities (HCAH), and the Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center (KINSC).