StoryCenter Board Spotlight: Reflections From Nina Shapiro-Perl

Editor’s Note: We recently asked several of our new board members to write about the significance of digital storytelling in their own lives. This week, we share the response of documentary filmmaker Nina Shapiro-Perl, who joined our board this fall. Thank you Nina, for all of your amazing work, and for your support of StoryCenter!

The first-time I saw a digital story, about 15 years ago, I remember being shocked and excited. Here was a new form of media with potentially transformative power.

I had been a documentary filmmaker for 20 years, working in the labor movement, traveling across the United States, trying to bring the stories and struggles of service workers to light. Janitors, nursing home workers, school bus drivers—telling their stories, wherever possible, in their own words. I followed a traditional documentary model. I was the director. I interviewed people. I decided whose words or voices would be used to tell the story. I shaped the look and feel of the film, and, at its root, I decided on the film’s intention and meaning.

Now, with a digital story, the subject of the film was actually the lead participant in the production. Here the storyteller chose the story from his or her own life. The storyteller wrote it, recorded the voiceover, chose the images, set the pacing, selected the music, and edited the short film, with the help of a trained facilitator. Here the storytellers shaped and told their own stories. And unlike traditional documentary, the subjects got to know their own stories better. It was tremendously exciting.

I set out to learn about digital storytelling and went to the source: StoryCenter (formerly the Center for Digital Storytelling). My union brought in StoryCenter facilitators to run workshops among public workers, groups of immigrant workers, and nursing home workers across the country. Starting with the Story Circle, facilitators helped workshop participants find the stories they wanted to tell, and then guided them through the three-day process of writing, voiceover recording, visualizations, and editing, culminating in a screening of the storytellers’ work. The experience deeply affected the participants. In some cases, it created solidarity among workers who previously saw each other as “The Other.”

And the process of digital storytelling took hold of my imagination. I began a community storytelling initiative at American University called the Community Voice Project, where anthropology and film students produced short films for non-profits, and assisted community storytellers in creating digital stories in Greater Washington, D.C. Before students set out to help community members create digital stories, they were required to first make their own. I wanted students to experience the power of telling one’s own story and understand the responsibility involved in assisting others on that journey.

Following the StoryCenter model, we started with the Story Circle, where students come face to face with their own stories—and with each other. It is a time when the facilitator (myself) creates a safe space and an opportunity for each individual to speak for five minutes, uninterrupted, and just to be listened to. The storyteller then has five minutes to receive respectful feedback from the facilitator and other students before the focus moves to the next student. The facilitator asks questions to help the storyteller find a moment of transformation in their narrative, around which they can sculpt their story—enough to start writing a first draft.

The stories unfold: a mother’s schizophrenia, an emotionally distant father, the death of a grandparent, a rape in freshman year, the paralysis of a close friend, coming out to a family member, etc. The stories tumble out among students who barely know each other. Stories that people didn’t expect to tell. Stories that people felt empowered to tell, when they heard the risks others were taking. With tears and laughter, stories flowed, going beyond social divides of race and ethnicity and gender and age and style, where they started. The room shifted, and class dynamics changed. Students observed these changes, writing about them in their journals. People started seeing each other in a new light.

At its best, digital storytelling is an interaction where both the storyteller and the facilitator and witnesses are changed in the process. In one class, students worked with local residents along the Anacostia River, a notorious site of environmental neglect, to share and produce digital stories. One story by environmental activist Brenda Richardson documents her experience growing up along the Anacostia River, but never going into it. For the first time, she links the anxieties she faced as a young single parent—both financial and social—to her fears about the water.

In her digital story, Brenda describes her first trip in a canoe:

I was so frightened of the river, yet found some solace... As I listened to the swish of the paddles… I felt this amazing healing sensation…. Through this experience I began to see things through a very different lens. I learned that the Anacostia River, even with all its problems, was a source of healing for a people who have been forsaken and ignored in our nation’s capital.

It was not only storytellers like Brenda Richardson who were transformed by the digital storytelling experience. As Allison Arlotta, the student who worked with Brenda, wrote in her journal:

I experienced the transformational power of personal digital storytelling in two ways—once with my own story, and once working with a community member to help her create her digital story. Completing my own story was a difficult and emotional process. I chose to share a very personal story, and struggled with how to communicate it... Going through this process helped me work with my community member, Brenda Richardson. Brenda was a gregarious and lively presence in our Story Circle, and I was thrilled to be paired with her. When we first started working together, she was reticent to talk about herself. I remember her first draft being an eloquent, glowing story, but about a friend of hers. With some gentle prodding and asking the right questions, Brenda came to realize this on her own and ended up creating a beautiful, quiet story about her relationship with the Anacostia River. Through the digital storytelling experience, she was able to discover things about herself that she never knew, like the origins of many of her anxieties and the significance of environmental activism in her life. Seeing Brenda light up when she presented her story to the rest of the audience at our showcase was truly unforgettable.

Such is the power of digital storytelling—to help people see and hear each other, across the social divides of social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, neighborhood, and religion. As participants and facilitators, we are opened to the lives and experiences of others. And we are made tender in the process.

Note: Quotes and references in the above piece are from Nina’s, “The Digital Story: Giving Voice to Unheard Washington,” IN Deep Stories: Practicing, Teaching and Learning Anthropology with Digital Storytelling. Eds. Nunez-James, Thornburg, Booker, DeGruyter, Open 2017, p.174.)