Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies Rises From the Ashes

In the summer of 1994, Duke University history major Chris Sims walked onto a farm in Johnston County, not to take up a hoe or harvest basket, but to wield a camera and notepad.

Sims was one of 52 student interns who interviewed and photographed migrant farmworkers while working for a nonprofit based at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. The rising senior had recently returned from Würzburg, Germany, where he studied documentary filmmaking, and his summer internship led him straight to the doors of the center.

“After seeing the photography exhibitions at CDS that summer, I signed up the next year to take every class that was on offer,” Sims said in an email, using his signature typewriter typeface. 

Sims, an associate professor at Duke, has been engaged with the center ever since—curating exhibits, developing its website, serving on award committees, and teaching. 

On May 14, Duke announced Sims as the center’s next director, one move among many that will more closely connect the nonprofit with the university. Sims will be the center’s third director in under a year, following vice provost Ed Balleisen, who served on an interim basis after former director Opeyemi Olukemi resigned last August. 

Aligning the center with Duke is an unsurprising result of a tumultuous period. Roughly half the staff left, seven were let go, and all programs except teaching undergrads ground to a halt. The center’s marquee documentary film festival, Full Frame, was canceled for the first time in its 26-year history.

Sims’ hire, which has been celebrated by many connected to the center, is one of many steps to cement the union. The center previously had semi-independent status with its own board that hired a director and managed its budget; now the director will report to Duke administrators over arts and interdisciplinary studies.  

The Assembly reported on turmoil at CDS in March 2023. Two months later, a faculty review committee recommended integrating the center into Duke. 

The review committee also recommended the director come from the faculty and that the center commit to “externally-facing documentary engagement, most importantly through Full Frame.” The center’s focus should be broadly on documentary, and not “applicable media,” which Olukemi championed to the skepticism and confusion of many colleagues.

That report came three months before Duke announced both Olukemi’s resignation and Full Frame’s in-person return. 

Duke’s administration has endorsed the review committee’s recommendations. This June, the center’s board of directors will dissolve, replaced with an advisory board where members no longer have fiduciary responsibilities. 

While Duke’s financial management arm has always invested the nonprofit’s endowment, the board will no longer approve requests to spend its assets. Seeded in 1989 with $5 million from the Lyndhurst Foundation, the endowment had grown to $41.2 million as of June 2022 and funded 55 percent of its budget in recent years.

“We have initiated a process to integrate the Center more fully into Duke,” Balleisen said in an email. This past academic year, the center funded three research fellowships for Duke Ph.D. students and multiple grants for faculty to either develop new documentary courses or to support their photography, documentary film, podcasting, and oral history work. 

While Full Frame returned this year and the center’s two campus buildings have re-opened to give students access to the darkroom, some cherished center programs are still missing. 

Until mid-April, the walls remained bare, indicative of the former curator’s position being one of seven positions terminated. The former gallery and Full Frame theater at American Tobacco permanently closed. And Audio Under the Stars, a summer-long audio festival, ended in 2023. 

Continuing education courses made available to the community outside Duke have been on hiatus since January 2022. 

Sims, an esteemed photographer who navigated U.S. Department of Defense clearances to photograph the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, will chart a new course for the center after he takes over on July 1. He said programs that took place this year will continue, as will undergraduate classes.

His vision includes strengthening the center’s teaching and programming. He said he will seek input from those connected to the center about its direction and priorities. This includes the continuing education program, which Sims said he plans to review and evaluate as soon as he starts.

Some expanded programs and new hires are underway, including for a professor who will work on a documentary project with UNC-Chapel Hill and for a postdoctoral fellow to work with Duke’s history department. But hiring other positions, whether for instructors or for support roles like web management and communications, will require additional funding.

One block south of Duke’s East campus, six plastic picnic tables sit on the lawn outside the center. A human-sized poster announcing the spring celebration of student work beckons people inside, remnants of an April 25 evening celebration where four students were awarded their certificate in Documentary Studies.

“In some ways the undergraduate, the inward facing part of the center, feels very optimistically like a sunrise after a storm,” said Tom Rankin, who directs Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts and is a former CDS director. 

Huiyin Zhou is one of four undergraduates who earned a certificate in documentary studies this spring, and one of over 100 students whose work fills the buildings’ galleries and halls. 

Zhou’s photos of Chinese queer feminist friends immediately greet you inside the center and from its porch. Intimate Encounters captures the interior lives of people cooking, making a banner, playing in parks, and scribbling captions on Polaroids, brought to life with writing from Zhou’s colorful Sharpies, a journaled intimacy decipherable to those who read Chinese.

“Every available space on the walls has student-created art on exhibit, and there’s palpable optimism and a renewed sense of energy and momentum in the Center,” Sims said in an email.

The morning of May 17, the high-pitched whir of drills sang off and on as members of Duke Facilities Management shuffled between buildings. It’s a buzz that brings life back to the center in more ways than one. Soon, Full Frame’s offices will return to the center after moving away just a year ago.

The festival was the center’s most visible push back into the community this April, screening 64 films in six Durham venues. Hallways were abuzz with members of most film teams in attendance and Q&As following many screenings, co-director Emily Foster said. 

Among an estimated 5,000 attendees were over 200 community volunteers and 150 students from 15 colleges selected as part of a fellowship program.

Attendance was down from 2019, the last time a festival was held in-person, but Foster and co-director Sadie Tillery remain optimistic. An announcement for the Full Frame Roadshow, where free screenings take place across the Triangle, is on the horizon. 

While some dormant seeds have again sprouted, current and former staff say they still have questions about what transpired last year, and why their work was put on pause. 

“I don’t think anybody has all the answers, but people need help,” Rankin said. “And Chris will be very good at that and sensitive to all the various constituencies.”

Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.