Laura Doggett 2015-2016

LCDPartner Organization: Next Generation Center

Final Project: Etta

Laura is a community artist and educator who believes in the transformative power of creative expression and storytelling in the lives of young people. She has spent much of the past twenty years creating opportunities for girls to be heard in their own voices. Through video, audio, writing, theater and visual arts, Laura has worked with girls from underserved and marginalized communities in the Appalachian mountains of KY and WV, the immigrant communities and inner-cities of NYC, Queens, the Bronx and DC, and Jordan’s Syrian refugee camps and urban areas, to express their experiences through various artistic approaches to storytelling. She has seen the tools of documentary arts give girls a sense of agency and power over their own stories and dreams, and is constantly thrilled to see the amazement in girls, whenever they share their artistic work with the public, as they realize the value their voices and visions carry in opening up channels of understanding, dialogue and change. She graduated from Duke University with an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts in 2013.

On working as a Hine Fellow, Laura says: “I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to work with an organization full of people who are deeply invested in finding innovative approaches to supporting young people in their communities. I’m excited to see where the young people I will work with take us as they engage with the documentary arts process - using these tools to find a voice that’s distinctive and undeniably their own, and drawing upon their surroundings, memory and imaginations to shape their stories. I hope that together, this young collective of media makers can create a complex and vibrant portrait that reflects what they most want to share about how they see and move through their worlds in this particular landscape of home and time in their lives.”

To see some of the work from Laura’s workshops in Jordan, please visit:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11201377/Syrias-refugees-Girls-use-photography-to-document-life-in-the-Zaatari-camp.html

http://m.rescue.org/blog/media-workshop-syrian-girls-voice-their-stories-through-film