With support from the California Arts Council, StoryCenter will refine new models for storytelling and participatory media, in order to engage vulnerable immigrants and refugees in using 2D and 3D video techniques and tactile art-making to explore their own unique narratives of “home” as a place, experience, and feeling. We will then showcasing these works as short videos and art pieces at a public screening and online, to build empathy and community engagement around immigrant rights.
Our digital storytelling and other participatory storytelling and art/media-making workshops and programs bring together small groups of people, to support them in sharing personal stories from their own lives. As we ease participants into the process of sharing vulnerable moments, they become open and receptive to others in the group, and space is established for creativity, empathy, and connection to emerge. This provides a solid basis for building intimate and trusting interpersonal relationships that can bridge into opportunities for sharing stories more broadly in public settings. Once stories have been produced, we work with storytellers and community partners to offer local and online story screening events and exhibitions, where stories are shown and audience members connect in small groups, to share their responses to what they’ve seen and identify recommendations for action on a range of social and civic issues. In recent years, we have greatly expanded our repertoire of workshops to include sessions focused on creative writing about “material memories” carried by cherished objects and photos; the use of digital media tools for documenting stories in AR/VR; oral history-based approaches to community storytelling; storyteller-visual artist collaborations; and more. What binds all of our programs and services together is a commitment to surfacing artistic personal stories told by and for the storytellers themselves; a focus on group process rather than one-on-one storytelling or story making techniques; and the use of participatory activities which engage our workshop participants– rather than specially-trained “experts”– in producing artistic and media content. These values are woven through our distribution practices, as we continue to privilege the voices and involvement of storytellers and our range of community partners in determining how, where, and why their work is exhibited publicly.

