About

A pile of monitors floating in a dark space showing various documentary projects by Laurids Andersen Sonne.

Located in the Department of Critical Media Practices adjacent to the Studio 7 gallery and screening room on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media brings people together to engage with the world through documentary. The Center was founded in 2016 by a group of faculty, including Critical Media Practices professors Reece Auguiste and Daniel Boord, documentary scholar Bill Nichols, and cultural anthropologist Paul Shankman.

At the Center, new projects push the boundaries of documentary to expand the social impact of media and technology. Committed to working with people across disciplines and experiences, the Center offers a collection of resources for artists and scholars to transform and extend their research and creative work through media production. These include courses, events, project support, fundraising tools, technical resources, and access to a growing regional, national, and international network of scholars and producers.

Mission

The Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media fosters the documentary impulse to build community and unlock the transformational power of media following four strategic imperatives:

  1. The Center inspires a regional, national, and international forum for documentary art and scholarship accessible to all.
  2. The Center provides impactful experiences in documentary teaching, learning, and professional development for emerging and established artists and scholars from diverse backgrounds.
  3. The Center showcases works of contemporary documentary art that promote and advance a multiplicity of perspectives and challenge dominant narratives.
  4. The Center supports documentary artists producing works that focus on personal, underrepresented, and culturally specific subjects that offer the most profound experiences of art made from life. 

The Center is part of the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder.

What We Do

To achieve our mission, the Center currently offers programming in four key areas:

  1. - The annual festival is a international documentary event that provides a exhibition platform for documentary artists in Colorado and worldwide. Mimesis is a community-oriented showcase of documentary and media focusing on personal, underrepresented, and culturally specific subjects. Alongside documentary programming, the festival also hosts conversations with documentary makers and scholars from around the world, masterclasses with internationally acclaimed artists, and unique documentary events.
  2. Mimesis Micro Grants- This program is at the heart of our goal to support the production of new documentary work at CU Boulder, and to provide access to documentary resources to university students and workers. The Micro Grant program creates a diverse group of Mimesis Artists whose projects are housed at the Center, whose projects range from landscape-scale immersive experiences to feature documentary films, and everything in between.
  3. - A partnership with the Department of Critical Media Practices, the Documentary Lab is the cornerstone of the graduate certificate in Interdisciplinary Documentary Media Practices. With each offering, the Lab brings researchers together from across disciplines to discuss contemporary documentary theory and workshop their documentary projects. The Lab features a guest speaker series bringing a wide range of acclaimed artists and scholars to engage with the CU Boulder community.
  4. Technical Resources and Expertise - Following the model of community media centers and boutique production houses, Mimesis maintains technical equipment and offers documentary expertise to support artists and scholars at CU Boulder. Currently, the Center helps artists to identify and pursue funding, maintains field equipment, hosts postproduction suites, and provides grant writing support, project development assistance, and production coordination for Mimesis Artists and participants in the Documentary Lab.

For more information, please visit our programs page for educational and professional development opportunities, our projects page for the documentary work we support, the Mimesis Micro Grant program, and our technical resources.

Contact us for more details, questions, or to schedule a consult at cdem@colorado.edu.

Support

The Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media is generously supported by the College of Media, Communication, and Information and by individual contributions.