Lecture Series On the Road: Elevating Youth Voices in the Pikes Peak Region

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

The history of documentary film in the U.S. took a dramatic turn in the 1960s, in tandem with the social and political movements unfolding at that time.

As technologies increasingly became more accessible, everyday people began to tell their own stories and those of their communities, relying less on national news organizations and omniscient narrators. Since then, documentary storytelling has evolved into a myriad of sub-genres with diverse voices.

In 2013, Colorado Springs-born Tom Shepard returned to Southern Colorado and founded the Youth Documentary Academy (YDA), a non-profit organization committed to training youth in the region how to locate stories from their lived experiences and translate them into high-impact documentary films. Since then, YDA has helped produced nearly 150 films, many of which are now broadcast nationally on the PBS series ‘Our Time.’

Graduates of the program regularly bring their films into schools, churches, community groups, and film festivals locally and nationally.

Tom’s lecture will describe the history of the Youth Documentary Academy and this unique model for helping youth in the middle of the country to amplify their voices, engage in national discourse, and create a living archive of documentary stories in the region.

Join Tom Shepard and Dr. Nadine Boljkovac, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at UCCS, for a discussion and Q&A following the presentation.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Tom Shepard has been directing and producing documentary films for over 20 years.

His film SCOUT’S HONOR won two top awards at the Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on the PBS program P.OV. He also directed and produced KNOCKING, a film about Jehovah’s Witnesses, which broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens.

His most recent film, UNSETTLED, about LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival and aired nationally on the World Channel’s Doc World. Tom’s film WHIZ KIDS and his collaboration THE GROVE with Andrew Abrahams also both aired nationally on public television.

All of Tom’s films have received acclaim in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Denver Post, among others. Previously, Tom worked as an editor at National Public Radio for Linda Wertheimer. He graduated from Stanford University, where he majored in biology and film. Tom is also the series producer for ‘Our Time’ on public television.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dr. Nadine Boljkovac is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at UCCS.

Until August 2022, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Düsseldorf and a Guest Lecturer at the University of Cologne (Germany). After obtaining her PhD in Film-Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (England), and her pre-doctoral teaching fellowship in Film at Aberdeen University (Scotland), Nadine held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, Brown University (RI, USA), and the University of New South Wales (Australia). From 2016-19, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University (England), before moving to the University of Cologne in 2019, where she was a 2018-19 Research Fellow at the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies and a 2018 Parsons New School for Design (NYC) Visiting Fellow.

Her book examining affect and ethics via documentarians/multimedia artists Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013), was reissued in paperback in 2015. Two books are in progress, including Little Women (2019): Movies Minute by Minute (for the Bloomsbury book series, Timecodes, co-edited by Nadine & Nicholas Rombes.