Our Story

How it all began

StoryCenter locates its roots in the artistic and cultural ferment in the United States during the 1970s and 80s. During this time, arts practitioners and educators across disciplines challenged the notion that art should be reserved for the gifted or the professional. Recognizing that lay practitioners could make enormous creative contributions, pioneering artists wanted to make art accessible to all, especially those traditionally left behind. The work of these artists and a broad range of collaborators gave voice to powerful stories of harm, healing, and hope in the midst of social and political conflict.

Just as they sought to increase community access to artistic expression, artists and arts educators sought to expand the scope of creative endeavor. The emerging digital technologies of the 1990s offered new tools for expression and fertile ground for experimentation. Drawing on these new practices, a group of San Francisco Bay Area media artists and designers came together to explore how digital media tools could be used to empower personal storytelling.

As numerous collaborators exchanged ideas and found common ground in a shared vision of cultural democracy and social change, a partnership took shape. Dana Atchley, a media producer and interdisciplinary artist, had developed NEXT EXIT, a multimedia autobiography. Among others, he attracted local theater producer Joe Lambert as a collaborator in producing the piece on stage. Together, they discovered that people with little or no prior experience in multimedia could create powerful personal stories using the new digital media technology. In 1994, Joe and Dana, along with Nina Mullen, founded the San Francisco Digital Media Center. Over the next several years, the group refined a curriculum that became the basis for a community workshop called “digital storytelling."

In 1998, the San Francisco Center for Digital Media moved to Berkeley and became the Center for Digital Storytelling, and in 2015, the organization became, simply, StoryCenter. StoryCenter has worked with nearly a thousand organizations around the world and trained more than fifteen thousand people in hundreds of workshops to share stories from their lives. Through our wide-ranging work, we have transformed the way that community activists, educators, health and human services agencies, business professionals, and artists think about the power of personal voice, in creating change.

In Memory of Dana Atchley
1941-2000

Dana Atchley's pioneering work as a media artist, video producer, and performer was the principle inspiration for StoryCenter's inception. Executive Director Joe Lambert worked with Dana for several years on the development of NEXT EXIT.

Dana passed away December 13, 2000 due to complications following a bone marrow transplant. A number of his friends and family created stories in his honor.