Katrina Media Fellows: June 2006

Ralph Adamo
New Orleans, Louisiana
Print Journalist
To investigate the slow demise of public education in New Orleans over the course of several failed administrations and to examine post-Katrina efforts to restructure public education in the city. At the center of this issue is the conflict between good-government idealism and the city’s historic dependence on an undereducated working class.

Adamo is a lifelong New Orleans resident, a professional writer, and an educator with more than five years' experience as a news reporter and another five as the director of the journalism program at the University of New Orleans. As a reporter, he covered politics, education, and the environment for the Gambit, the alternative weekly newspaper in New Orleans. He has taught at the university level for 17 years, most recently as an instructor at Louisiana State University and an adjunct professor at Tulane. Since 2001 and until Katrina, Adamo was also a New Orleans public school teacher, teaching creative writing in a middle school for the arts.

Larry Blumenfeld
Brooklyn, New York
Multimedia Journalist
To explore Katrina's effects on New Orleans music culture and on the cultural heritage of the city. Through interviews with jazz musicians, brass band players, second-line participants, he will explore the challenges musicians now face in preserving their art form and communities and how this cultural devastation intersects with issues of race, class, and the allocation of government funds.

Blumenfeld is a cultural journalist with fifteen years of experience writing for leading newspapers, alternative weeklies, websites, and specialized jazz magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Inside Arts Magazine, and Global Rhythm. He has served as Editor-at-Large for Jazziz magazine for the past six years and is Producer of the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Maine. Blumenfeld was the producer of several music CDs including Echoes of the Forest: Music of the Central African Pygmies (Ellipsis Arts, 1995) and Harvest Song: Music from Around the World Inspired by Working the Land (Ellipsis Arts, 1995). He received a Service Recognition Award from the International Association of Jazz Educators and from 2001-2002 was a Midcareer Fellow at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s National Arts Journalism Program.

Debbie Caffery
Lafayette, Louisiana
Photographer
To document the journey of displaced residents transferred from the Convention Center and Superdome to the Baton Rouge River Shelter, the destruction and neglect of the Ninth Ward, and personal items left behind in now abandoned houses and churches.

Caffery has been making photographs of the people and culture of her native Louisiana for over 30 years. Past projects include images of immigrant sugarcane field workers, alligator hunts, and family portraits in Louisiana, as well as photographs of rural culture in Mexico and Portugal. Caffery’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. She has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), the first Lou Stoumen Mid Career Grant (1996), and the Louisiana Governor’s Art Award (1990). Her work is included in the permanent collections of many museums including the Smithsonian Institution, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Caffery has published several highly praised books, including Polly and Carry Me Home.

Sara Catania
Los Angeles, California
Print Journalist
To tell the stories of Vietnamese-Americans in the Gulf region during the disaster and the unique hurdles they face in rebuilding their community, which numbered as large as 50,000 before the storm.

Over the course of her 15-year career as a print journalist, Catania has worked as a reporter at numerous local and national media outlets. In the 1990s, she served as a reporter at the L.A. Times for two years and worked for seven years as a staff writer for the LA Weekly. Currently, Catania is a freelance writer on issues related to criminal justice, politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles magazine and Legal Affairs. She is also a contributing writer for Mother Jones. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2004 and an OSI Center on Crime, Communities and Culture Media Fellowship in 2002.

June Cross
New York, New York
Filmmaker
To create a documentary film that follows the lives of a large family from New Orleans as they encounter shifting land-use policy, insurance quagmires, political dramas, and the upending of their personal lives.

Cross is a broadcast journalist with over 20 years of experience. She was Executive Producer for This Far By Faith (2004), a multi-part PBS series on the role that religious faith and conviction have played in the empowerment of African Americans. From 1991-1999, she served as the sole staff producer for Frontline, creating numerous award-winning documentaries such as Secret Daughter (1996), A Kid Kills (1992), and A Showdown in Haiti (1993). She has also worked as Producer for CBS Evening News and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. She has received research grants from the Ford Foundation (to pursue reporting on the policies of Louisiana post-Katrina and to explore the public health crises faced by the Louisiana diaspora), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Harley Foundation. Cross is the recipient of the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, three Emmy Awards, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Cross is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Dee Davis
Whitesburg, Kentucky
Filmmaker
To produce documentary shorts, public service announcements, and photographs as part of a national media campaign on rural Gulf Coast residents' struggle to re-establish their lives and communities. He will highlight how the failure to formulate effective rural policy is reaping disaster in the recovery areas and will use the campaign to propose policy alternatives.

Davis is a veteran of the community-based and independent media arts field. He is producer and president of the Center for Rural Strategies, which he founded in 2001 to use communication tools to improve the public policy discourse about rural America. Before starting Rural Strategies, Davis was Executive Producer of Appalshop Films and Television for nearly three decades. While there, Appalshop received a number of awards for its video work, including the duPont-Columbia Award for Broadcast Journalism and the Media Arts Center Award from the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.

Annette Foglino
New York, New York
Multimedia Journalist
To write articles about citizens who have made personal commitments to rebuilding their communities after Hurricane Katrina. Foglino will focus on the hurricane’s effect on low-income, minority neighborhoods and the elderly and explore whether demographics influence where and how governments decide to rebuild.

Foglino is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written many investigative pieces on social issues, such as youth violence, drug addiction, prostitution, and teen pregnancy. Her work has been published in magazines such as Life, New York, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook. She also has experience as a producer and screenwriter for news magazine shows and dramas. In 2000, she received an Excellence in Crime Reporting award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen
Paris, France
Photographers
To document the response of federal, state, and local agencies in Mississippi and Louisiana and the irrevocable damage to New Orleans’ infrastructure, natural environment, and culture. Integral to these stories are the daily struggles of evacuees as they negotiate the tangled web of government and nonprofit bureaucracies.

Greene is a Paris-based photographer who received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. In 1986, he moved to Paris and began covering world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, war and famine in Southern Sudan, the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas poisoning in Bhopal, India, and the emergency relief operations of Médecins sans Frontiers in Rwanda and Zaire. From 1994 to 2003, Greene was engaged in a long-term photography project on the Chechen rebellion, which resulted in a book titled Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 to 2003 (Trolley Editions, 2003). Greene has won a number of awards, among them the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography (2004), several prizes from World Press Photo, the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), and Picture of the Year for his New York Times Magazine story “Chechnya” (1997). He has been a member of Agence VU photo agency since 1991. Greene will serve as Project Director.

Van Lohuizen is a Dutch photojournalist who has covered a number of international conflicts and environmental issues. Most recently, he has documented the diamond industry, tracing the diamonds from the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Angola, to polishing centers in India, to consumer markets in Europe and the United States. He has presented the resulting photographs to mining cities and towns, as well as major capitals throughout the world. Van Lohuizen has received a number of awards, including grants from the city council of Amsterdam, the Anna Cornelius Foundation, and the French Ministry of Culture. He has been a member of Agence VU photo agency since 1996.

Mark Hertsgaard
San Francisco, California
Print Journalist
To examine, in light of Katrina, the ways in which poor communities, specifically communities of color, bear a disproportionate burden of environmental crises caused by global warming. Hertsgaard will interview a wide range of people in the region about what went wrong before the hurricane and whether current reconstruction efforts are moving in the right direction.

Hertsgaard is a journalist, broadcaster, and author whose books have been translated into sixteen languages. He is the author most recently of The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (2002). Hertsgaard has contributed hundreds of articles to leading publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit. Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for The Nation, the political correspondent for the national satellite channel Link TV, and a commentator for NPR’s “Marketplace.” He has taught writing and journalism at John Hopkins University and the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism.

Kamoinge
New York, New York
Photographers
To document the effects of relocation on the economic, social, and racial fabric of communities of color in Louisiana and Mississippi. During the term of the fellowship, ten photographers will travel to African American communities in the region to document the relocation of affected residents, particularly those with physical disabilities and the elderly.

Kamoinge is a collective of African-American photographers created in 1963. Its early members included Anthony Barboza, Roy DeCarava, Larry Stewart, and Melvin Mills. Since its inception, Kamoinge has continued to serve as a forum for African-American photographers to review and critique each others work and counteract the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in the media by encouraging its members to document and define their own communities. The group was instrumental in influencing museums and galleries to exhibit works by photographers of color for the first time. Kamoinge’s current list of members consists of an impressive roster of renowned African American photographers including Barboza, C. Daniel Dawson, Russell K. Frederick, Eli Reed, Danny Simmons, June DeLairre Truesdale, and Shawn Walker.

Tia Lessin
New York, New York
Filmmaker
To create a documentary that follows the journey of a young African-American couple from the Ninth Ward who survived Hurricane Katrina and brought dozens of friends and neighbors to safety. The project offers a window into how the hurricane affected society’s most vulnerable—the elderly, the poor, the hospitalized, and the incarcerated—and examines the new underclass of “Katrina homeless.”

Lessin is an Emmy Award–nominated filmmaker dedicated to producing social-issue programming and amplifying the voices of those who fight injustice. She was a producer for Michael Moore’s feature-length documentaries Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, and The Big One, and has worked on a number of documentary projects for television that aired on PBS, Bravo, Fox, and BBC2. She has extensive experience collaborating with nonprofit organizations and social service agencies in order to disseminate her work and expand the audience of her films. She was the recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Best Broadcast Journalist (2002) and a Soros Documentary Fund grant (2001) for her film Behind the Labels.

Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie
New Orleans, Louisiana
Filmmakers
To complete a documentary, five years in the works, that focuses on Tremé, a historic New Orleans neighborhood that was home to one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most politically active black communities in the country during slavery. They will trace Katrina’s impact on the residents, local character, racial composition, and identity of the neighborhood.

Logdson has over fifteen years of experience working on documentaries about social justice and history. She has produced and directed two award-winning short documentaries, Tomboy and Theresa, which have screened at festivals worldwide and aired on local PBS stations. Logsdon is also a nationally acclaimed editor who has worked on award-winning projects that were broadcast on PBS, HBO, and Channel Four in England. She also edited the Academy Award–nominated The Weather Underground. She was awarded fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the California Arts Council. Logsdon was raised in New Orleans and relocated to California after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Elie is a national award-winning metro columnist and accomplished author. For the past five years, he has worked as a Metro Columnist for The Times-Picayune, where he has published several columns advocating for the rights of displaced New Orleanians, cultural and historical preservation, and his own vision of a reconstructed city. He is currently working on several documentaries about New Orleans food, and is writing a book on the enduring legacy of the slave trade on two continents. As a producer for the Smithsonian Institute’s Jazz Oral History Project, Elie conducted interviews with many of New Orleans’ elder jazz musicians. He and his family live in the Tremé and have become key figures in the area’s cultural renaissance.

Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson
New York, New York
Multimedia Journalists
To create a fictional novel based on fact that follows the journeys of several people as they escape New Orleans and struggle to reunite with their families and start new lives. Maharidge and Williamson will employ a unique format that incorporates documentary photography with text and combines the reportorial techniques of nonfiction with narrative elements of fiction.

Maharidge is currently a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, he taught at Stanford University’s Department of Communication for ten years, and was a senior staff writer at The Sacramento Bee. He has over thirty years of journalism experience and has received numerous awards, including the Gustavus Myers Center award and Hunter College’s Social Justice Journalism Award. He has received grants from the Freedom Forum Professors’ Publishing Program and the Pope Foundation, a Lucius W. Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

Williamson is a photojournalist for The Washington Post who has thirty years of experience coving a variety of global events, including the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Philippine revolution, strife in the Middle East, the Gulf War, and conflicts in Africa and the Balkans. Prior to working at The Washington Post, Williamson worked at The Sacramento Bee and taught at Western Kentucky University. He has received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the conflict in Yugoslavia, White House News Photographer’s Association Photographer of the Year, National Press Photographers Association’s “Newspaper Photographer of the Year,” and the Crystal Eagle Award, which recognizes photography that has had a documented effect on society.

Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun
New Orleans, Louisiana
Photographers
To continue their 30-year commitment to documenting African American residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and produce 40 post-flood portraits and 20 oral histories of fellow displaced residents now living in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.

Both raised in New Orleans, McCormick and Calhoun have been documenting the African American community in New Orleans and its surrounding areas for the past thirty years. Past work includes stories on laborers on the loading docks of the Mississippi River, sugar cane plantations on River Road, and day laborers working in sweet potato and cotton fields. In addition, they have produced an extensive body of work on Angola Prison, focusing on its incarcerated men and the impact of the prison system on their families. Their photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia African American Museum, Civil Rights Museum, and New Orleans Museum of Art. They have received several awards from the New Orleans Press Club, and their photographs of Angola State Prison were published in Aperture Magazine in February 2006. McCormick and Calhoun lost two-thirds of their photographic archives when their home and studio were ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. They have relocated to Spring, Texas but plan to return to their New Orleans home and photography studio, which is recognized as a local landmark and is currently being rebuilt with the assistance of a number of non-profit organizations.

John McQuaid
Silver Spring, Maryland
Print Journalist
To write a series of articles, "Re-imagining New Orleans," which explores the relationship between city residents and the tenuous geography around them. He will examine the staggering engineering, environmental, and social policy challenges of rebuilding.

McQuaid is an investigative print journalist focusing on science, environment, and politics. During his 20-plus years at the Times-Picayune, he explored big ecological problems and their impact on people, politics, and institutions. He was the lead writer on “Oceans of Trouble,” a Pulitzer Prize–winning series that looked at the global fisheries crisis and its devastating effects on fishing communities. McQuaid also co-authored “Washing Away,” the 2002 series that analyzed the rising hurricane risk to the city and predicted what would happen when it sustained a direct hit from a major hurricane. In the months after Katrina, he helped drive the paper’s coverage of the levee system’s failures, dissecting the flawed design of the Army Corp of Engineers. He recently left the Times-Picayune to co-author a book, Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Super Storms, which will be published in August 2006.

Steve Myers
Mobile, Alabama
Print Journalist
To report on FEMA’s attempts to address its outdated flood maps, which homeowners relied upon and whose inadequacy contributed to the loss of thousand of homes along the Gulf Coast.  He will examine whether the new maps accurately reflect the frequency of hurricanes and why the agency decided not to strengthen standards for certain types of construction.

Steve Myers has been a county reporter for 4 years with the Mobile Register in Mobile, Alabama. He recently left the paper to attend the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University; he will soon be retuning to Mobile as a freelance reporter. While at the Mobile Register, Myers won numerous awards from the Alabama Associated Press Managing Editors including first place for news feature and, most recently, the freedom of information award for his coverage on the Mobile city court’s practice of expunging certain court records.

Katy Reckdahl
New Orleans, Louisiana
Print Journalist
To write stories that examine the realities of daily life in New Orleans’ Tremé and Irish Channel neighborhoods, focusing on people in poverty and the challenges they face in terms of jobs, housing, health care, and indigent defense.

For six years, Reckdahl worked as a reporter in New Orleans, writing about poverty, police misconduct, the city’s Charity Hospital, its Mardi Gras Indians and corner bars. Until Hurricane Katrina, Reckdahl was a reporter for the Gambit Weekly, the alternative weekly in New Orleans; she was also a regular New York Times stringer. Over the past two years, she won first place from the Louisiana Press Association for her coverage on problems with local elections and on death-row exonerations in Louisiana.

Joseph Rodriguez and Patrice Burke Pascual
Brooklyn, New York
Photographer and Writer
To create a website and traveling exhibition of 25 multimedia portraits of individuals affected by Hurricane Katrina. Each portrait will be accompanied by an audio recording and text that places the image within the context of local and national policies regarding housing, education, employment, and criminal justice.

Rodriguez is a New York-based freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Marie Claire, GQ, Newsweek, and Stern and included in exhibitions at the African American Museum, Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, and the International Center of Photography, among others. He has published numerous books including Juvenile (PowerHouse Books, 2004), The New Americans (New Press, 2004), and East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A. (PowerHouse Books, 1998). He is the recipient of awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1999, he was awarded a Soros Justice Media Fellowship and was included in OSI ’s Moving Walls exhibit in 2000. Rodriguez teaches at New York University and the International Center of Photography.

Pascual is Deputy Director of Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. In this position, she edits the center’s magazine for journalists and creates training events and resources for journalists who want to enrich their coverage of social issues, particularly those affecting the disadvantaged. Prior to joining the Casey Center, she was a freelance writer who wrote about programs in child welfare, juvenile crime, and mental health. She has also held positions at Connect for Kids in Washington, DC, and Connecticut Public Television and Radio in Hartford, CT.

Tena Rubio
Oakland, California
Radio Documentarian
To produce radio documentaries on the influx of immigrant labor in New Orleans and its impact on political, economic and social issues, as well as the environmental impact of the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast wetlands and the extent to which rebuilding efforts account for issues of race and class equity.

For the past eight years, Rubio has worked in local television and long-format public radio. Rubio was reporter for Free Speech Radio News and Pacifica Radio, both based in Washington DC. Rubio is a now a Senior Producer and Host for the National Radio Project program “Making Contact,” a nationally syndicated 30-minutes public affairs radio program broadcast weekly on 200 radio stations across the country. Rubio was instrumental in developing the program’s “Katrina Uncovers” series, which examined the political, social, cultural, and economic landscape of the Region in the wake of the disaster.

Tim Shorrock
Memphis, Tennessee
Print Journalist
To examine how post-Katrina economic development in the Gulf Coast skews toward powerful corporations and fails to address the needs of the poor. Shorrock will chronicle the health care crisis in New Orleans, the strategic agenda of gambling and energy interests and the militarized federal response to Katrina.

Shorrock is a Memphis-based independent journalist with over 25 years experience reporting on national security, global business, East Asia, and the Gulf Coast. Shorrock is the recipient of investigative reporting grants from The National Institute and the Fund for Investigative Reporting; he is contributing writer to Mother Jones, Harper’s, The Nation and Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. During his nine years as the business reporter for the daily Journal of Commerce, Shorrock covered U.S.-Asia finance and trade, U.S. trade policy, maritime and shipbuilding industries and labor and workplace issues. He was also the founder and managing editor of Asian Assets Direct, a financial news website focused on U.S. pension investment and private equity funds buying bankrupt Asian companies.

Stephen Smith and Kate Ellis
St. Paul, Minnesota
Radio Documentarians
To produce a radio documentary that will tell the stories of several families in one coastal community as they struggle to survive, and then recover, from the storm. "Rebuilding Biloxi" will give radio listeners a deeply personal look at how racial and economic inequality plays out in the daily lives of those aiming to rebuild after Katrina.

Smith and Ellis are veteran radio producers with extensive experience researching American race relations and African American history. Their collaborative work includes Say it Plain, a book and CD set and a companion documentary on African American political oratory of the past century; Thurgood Marshall Before the Court, a profile of Marshall’s career as the nation’s leading civil rights attorney; Korea—the Forgotten War, which documents the significance of that conflict in black history; and Remembering Jim Crow, a radio history of Jim Crow as told by African Americans who lived through the era. Ellis holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University; her dissertation focused on the Jim Crow era in Louisiana. Smith earned an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, concentrating on African American literature. He is also the co-creator and editor of American Radio Works.

Jacqueline Soohen
New York, New York
Filmmaker
To create a series of short and long-form documentaries that follow individual Katrina survivors in New Orleans in order to explore a range of racial and economic justice issues such as criminal justice, public housing, and day labor.

Soohen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with over ten years of experience making social documentaries with an emphasis on global justice. Her films have screened on television and at hundreds of film festivals. Her feature length documentaries include Fallujah (2005) and Shocking and Awful (2005), both of which were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Fourth World War (2004), This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2002), and Zapatista (1998). As director and co-founder of Big Noise Films and a co-founder of Indymedia, she has pioneered innovative distribution mechanisms—through the Internet and through national and international screening networks.

Amanda Spake
Churchton, Maryland
Print Journalist
To spotlight the delivery of health services in smaller communities, particularly in Mississippi, and highlight the importance of reducing economic and health disparity in the Gulf Region and beyond.

Spake is a print journalist with more than 20 years experience as a staff writer at several national media organizations. Since 1997, she has been a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report. She has also been a contributing writer to Health Magazine, Self, Family Circle, Redbook, and Vogue, among others. She also worked as an editor at Ms. Magazine and Mother Jones. In the days after the hurricane, Spake was among the reporters at U.S. News and World Report who covered Hurricane Katrina and its impact on health care along the Gulf Coast.

Dean Starkman
Brooklyn, New York
Print Journalist
To examine the response of the nation’s $1.3-trillion insurance industry to the biggest ever natural catastrophe in the United States and to explore the near-complete collapse of the government regulatory system responsible for making sure insurers treat policyholders fairly.

Starkman is a print journalist with more than 20 years experience, including nine years at The Wall Street Journal. While working at the Providence Journal Bulletin, he helped lead a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and was later named investigative chief. At The Wall Street Journal, he led the paper’s coverage of the contentious reconstruction of the World Trade Center reconstruction and wrote stories on eminent domain abuse. His work on eminent domain was cited by Illinois Appellate Court in a landmark case curbing local powers. Most recently, he worked for The Washington Post where he covered Eliot Spitzer, the investigation of insurance giant American International Group Inc., and Hurricane Katrina. His work typically looks at the nexus of power and money, and its effects on ordinary people.

Christopher Tetens and Lauren Thompson
Brooklyn, New York
Filmmakers
To document the failures of the New Orleans criminal justice system that were brought to light by Hurricane Katrina, particularly the brutality and neglect faced by those incarcerated in the Orleans Parish Prison during the disaster.

Tetens is currently working towards a graduate degree in media management from New School University and has extensive experience producing long and short format documentaries, broadcast documentary series, reality series, and promotional and industrial films. He has produced and worked as a field and segment producer for MTV Networks, Discovery Channel, A&E, Court TV, Nickelodeon, and TLC.

Thompson received a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has worked as Producer, Director, and Field Producer/Camera on a number of programs for ABC, A&E, CNN, Food Network, Oxygen Network, and Court TV. She is the recipient of two Telly Awards, the Cine Golden Eagle Award, and John M. Patterson Award for her Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism thesis.

Tetens and Thompson relocated to Baton Rouge and formed 360 Media Group in September 2005 to pursue their current New Orleans film project.

Eve Troeh
New Orleans, Louisiana
Radio Documentarian
To produce a radio series on community-based efforts to determine the future of New Orleans as well as privatization of public housing; life in an urban FEMA trailer park; and the role of street culture traditions in neighborhood rebuilding. Troeh will also monitor how individual and community rebuilding efforts are supported or hindered by government at all levels.

Troeh is a radio journalist who has been living in New Orleans since 2000. Since 2004, Troeh has worked as a freelance radio journalist for National Public Radio and as a stringer for Public Radio International. Prior to freelancing, Troeh was an editor at American Routes, a radio program focused on American music and culture. Troeh also serves as a volunteer mentor for NPR’S Next Generation Radio, a radio production training program for high school and college students.

Clarence Williams
Kenner, Louisiana
Photographer
To produce a photographic essay chronicling New Orleans from flood to aftermath to rebuilding, with special emphasis on the impact rebuilding efforts will have on the racial makeup of the city.

Williams is a freelance photographer who was visiting relatives in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. As a result of his experience, he has moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans to document the continuing issues of racism, poverty, and government neglect that were brought to light by Katrina. His first-person account of Katrina, based on a journal that he kept during that time, was featured in the Miami Herald along with his photographs and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Williams was a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times from 1995 to 2003, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography (1997), Robert F. Kennedy Photojournalism Award (1997), National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year (1997), and first place for issue reporting by the Picture of the Year Contest (1996).

Youth Media Groups

Downtown Community Television Center
New York, New York
F ilm
To enable young video artists from New York City to travel to New Orleans to collaborate with local teen reporters on short documentary pieces about displaced teens, environmental safety, race, and the effects of the hurricane on the New Orleans Juvenile Justice System. Community screenings and dialogues will be organized in New York and New Orleans in conjunction with local non-profit partners.

Founded in 1972, DCTV has fostered a diverse and inclusive media arts community for over 30 years. DCTV is the most honored independent nonprofit media center in the nation. Its productions, reaching over 100 million viewers each year, have received 13 national Emmy Awards, 3 duPont-Columbia Awards, and every other major award in the television field.

DCTV complements its own artistic achievements by working to extend the tools of television and electronic media production to a broader, more diverse set of artists. Toward this end, over the past 32 years DCTV has taught over 50,000 students, most of them members of low-income and minority communities, the essentials of television production. DCTV offers over 150 free or low-cost video and electronic media training workshops to 2,000 students a year.

Educational Video Center
New York, New York
Film
To produce a documentary focusing on two Hurricane Katrina evacuees who relocated to New York: a single mother trying to find housing and employment and a young man whose post-Katrina confrontations with New Orleans police led him to become politically active. The film will examine the economic, emotional, and socio-political barriers that stand in their way as they rebuild their lives.

The Educational Video Center ( EVC ) is a community-based media center that teaches documentary video production and media analysis to youth, educators, and community organizers. Through the process of documentary video productions, EVC students learn research, writing, and reporting skills, enhancing their capacities for critical analysis and creative self-expression. EVC is dedicated to the creative and community-based use of video and multi-media as a means to develop the academic, civic and work preparation skills of at-risk youth.

Students at the Center
New Orleans, Louisiana
Film
To create a series of short movies that will delve into issues identified by Katrina-affected young people. The films will explore the double-displacement felt by students in New Orleans who had evacuated and then returned, only to find themselves alienated from their friends, their family, their homes, and their pre-Katrina schools.

Prior to the storm, through intensive writing and media projects, Students at the Center worked with youth in New Orleans’ lowest performing schools to develop literacy and civic skills to enable students to become catalysts for change in their schools and communities. Since September 2005, SAC has worked to reestablish opportunities for youth voices to be heard. Currently, they are continuing to work with students displaced by the hurricanes on media projects, they are creating school/community-based programs in New Orleans, and they are part of a coalition of groups assisting with the rebuilding of public education in New Orleans.

Youth Radio
San Francisco, California
Radio
To create a one-hour documentary, Surviving Katrina, that will help Gulf Coast youth tell their stories. Topics include the limited public services available to those living in the hardest-hit areas, the social consequences of the Katrina diaspora, and the disproportionate environmental impact of the storm on poor communities.

Youth Radio’s mission is to promote young people’s intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets. Their award-winning organization has trained thousands of teenagers in broadcast journalism, radio, web and video production, engineering, media advocacy and literacy. Through hands-on training, one-on-one relationships with adults and peers, and direct production of their own programs, young people gain valuable communication, media journalism and production skills. The fresh and compelling voices of these young reporters can be heard both locally and nationally, on radio, the Internet, and through print media. Youth Radio programming reaches an estimated 23 million people each year through its many media outlets.