2011 – The Year that Flew
I’m still processing many of my experiences in 2011, and plan to post some of my favorite images, and stories from the year. One highlight was traveling to Port-au-Prince Haiti to co-facilitate a digital storytelling workshop at KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), an opportunity I was able to take part in thanks to The Goldin Institute, and as a technical and production consultant graduate assistant for Stories at Work Project, with DePaul University Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse professor Lisa Dush. The handful female participants were tasked with writing, recording and producing their own digital stories detailing very personal, and at times, tragic, events of their lives. The other facilitators and I were tasked with training them to script, record and produce their stories, most of the time, through an interpreter, or by attempting to muddle through my rusty high-school French.
The experience for me was life-changing. While it was difficult to shed my documentary photojournalist skin for the week, I grew ever more appreciative of the magnitude a simple process such as digital storytelling can have and gained many insights into the empowerment of authorship.
