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Talking Eyes Media teaches virtually at Mountain Workshops

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Mountain Light

Are you looking for inspiration, rejuvenation or a little of both but do not have the time to commit to an entire week of Mountain goodness? Then Mountain Light is the perfect ticket for you. Each evening starting Tuesday, Oct. 19, through Thursday, Oct. 21, the Mountain experience will be collaborating with a different organization to bring you inspiration, valuable information, helpful tips and opportunities to connect with industry professionals who can help you reach your goals in your visual storytelling career.

These nightly sessions will be open to both Mountain Workshops participants (part of their workshops tuition) and the general public for $35 per night, or $70 for all three nights. All proceeds from these sessions will contribute to educational initiatives through WKU PJ and our nonprofit collaborators. If you attend any one session, you will be able to return for free on Friday, Oct. 22, for an evening of entertainment and an opportunity to mingle with Mountain participants, faculty and staff.

We hope you will join us in celebrating 46 years of storytelling at the Mountain Workshops! Enrollment for any of these nightly events will be open up to 24 hours before the session begins.


TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19  •  TALKING EYES MEDIA

For nearly two decades, Talking Eyes has been creating and distributing compelling media that celebrates diversity and advocates for positive social change. Founded by Julie Winokur and Ed Kashi, this nonprofit media organization is committed to uncovering underreported issues and spotlighting the people who make a difference.

Talking Eyes works extensively with marginalized communities, nonprofits, and educators to produce films, photo essays, websites, interpretive exhibitions, and books. Talking Eyes’ media has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, PBS, MSNBC, and National Geographic, and received numerous awards, including “Best Online Storytelling Project” of 2021 from Pictures of the Year International for the project Newest Americans.

At the core of Talking Eyes’ efforts is extensive community outreach and nontraditional distribution. Through public programming, curricular materials, grassroots partnerships and community engagement, Talking Eyes approach is designed for impact beyond publication and broadcast to inspire meaningful social change. 

WHEN?

Tuesday, October 19

6:00 - 10:00 PM Central Time 

WHERE?

Nowhere – our virtual interactive world. A link specific to your purchased evening presentation(s) will be emailed to you by 11:00 am the day each presentation. Be sure when you register for the event(s) you use an email that you monitor, this email is where we will provide the secret key for your access into our exciting virtual world.


7:00 PM CENTRAL TIME | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19 

Room 1   |   Isadora Kosofsky  

Language of Intimacy: the long-term and immersive approach to documentary photography  

Isadora Kosofsky will reflect on the life-altering process, challenges, and relationships formed while working on storytelling projects for years. She will present an ongoing, longitudinal documentation that shadows one woman’s journey as she reckons with sustained traumas and transformation.

BIOGRAPHY

Isadora Kosofsky is a Los Angeles based documentary photographer who is known for spending years shadowing individuals and communities. She is a contributor to National Geographic Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, TIME, Le Monde and others. Ms. Kosofsky was a 2012 Inge Morath Award recipient. She is a TED Fellow, part of a network of global changemakers, and gave a talk at TED 2018. Her monograph, Senior Love Triangle, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2020. Ms. Kosofsky has reported extensively inside hospital ICUs during the pandemic and is responsible for some of the only photojournalism from inside a COVID+ nursing home in the US.


7:00 PM CENTRAL TIME | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19

Room 2   |   Salwan Georges  

The United States in 2020 

In 2020, the world faced unimaginable challenges and difficult circumstances that collectively changed our lives forever. It was a tough year for many journalists who were simply doing their job knowing the risks. In the U.S., as a staff photojournalist for the Washington Post, Salwan Georges covered a racial reckoning in Minneapolis, an unforgettable election across the country, and a deadly pandemic. His verbal recollection and visual historic documentation of the year we want to forget, but cannot, will be sure to entertain, inform and enlighten all of us.

BIOGRAPHY

Salwan Georges is an Iraqi-American Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, he was a staff photographer and videographer at the Detroit Free Press. He studied journalism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. In 2020, Georges was awarded a Pulitzer Prize as part of a staff entry from The Washington Post covering climate change around the world and was awarded, a team finalist for Public Service, covering America’s deadly opioid epidemic. In 2021, Georges was named Photographer of The Year by Pictures of the Year International for covering a racial reckoning in Minneapolis, an unforgettable election across the U.S., and a deadly pandemic. Georges' work has been published and exhibited worldwide. His work on the Middle Eastern communities in the United States has been exhibited at the Arab American National Museum and has been added to a collection at the Library of Congress in D.C.


8:00 PM CENTRAL TIME | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19 

Room 1   |   Ed Kashi  

Advocacy and Impact in Visual Storytelling

Ed Kashi will share selections of projects that talk about the ways in which advocacy journalism in photography can be practiced, including personal projects, commissions from foundations, non profits and NGOs. He’ll illustrate how he uses this new paradigm with intention to create compelling stories that are ultimately published in the editorial sphere and the various impacts his work has had, from being a part of changing legislation to earning direct contributions to subjects whose story he’s told.

BIOGRAPHY

Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist who uses photography, filmmaking and social media to explore geopolitical and social issues that define our times. He is also a dedicated educator and mentor to photographers around the world and lectures frequently on visual storytelling, human rights and the world of media. He has covered topics as diverse as the impact of oil in Nigeria, the protestant community in Northern Ireland, the lives of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the impact of an aging society through his groundbreaking project, Aging in America, climate change, the plight of Syrian refugees, and the global epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease among agricultural workers.

A sensitive eye and an intimate and compassionate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his intense and unsparing work. A member of VII Photo Agency since 2010, Kashi has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition. His early adoption of hybrid visual storytelling has produced a number of influential short films and in 2015 he was named Multimedia Photographer of the Year. Kashi’s embrace of new approaches to visual storytelling has led to creative social media and printed projects for a range of clients including National Geographic, Open Society Foundations, The New Yorker, MSNBC, GEO Germany, Fortune, Human Rights Watch, International Medical Corps, MediaStorm, NBC.com, New York Times Magazine, Oxfam, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and TIME magazine.

From implementing a unique approach to photography and filmmaking in his 2006 Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook, to real-time Instagram coverage of Hurricane Sandy for TIME Magazine in 2012, Kashi continues to create powerful imagery and engage with the world in new ways. A leading voice in the photojournalism world, Kashi frequently lectures on a wide range of topics for arts institutions, universities, schools and professional organizations. His work has been published and exhibited worldwide, receiving numerous awards and honors.

Through his editorial assignments and personal projects Kashi has published nine books, including Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, THREE, and Photojournalisms. In 2002, Kashi in partnership with his wife, writer + filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media.  The non-profit company has produced numerous award-winning short films, exhibits, books, and multimedia pieces that explore significant social issues. They are currently engaged in a 7-year storytelling project with Rutgers University in Newark focused on immigration for which they recently received a two year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their project, Newest Americans, was just awarded Best Online Project of the Year from Pictures of the Year International.


8:00 PM CENTRAL TIME | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19 

Room 2   |   Julie Winokur  

Cross-platform Storytelling to Unleash Creativity and Expand Audience 

Julie Winokur will discuss cross-platform storytelling that takes projects beyond any single medium in order to expand the possibilities for creative expression, collaboration and audience reach. Winokur will inspire participants to reimagine their approaches as she shares work that incorporates photography, video, audio, exhibition, interactive, and beyond.

BIOGRAPHY

Julie Winokur, Executive Director of Talking Eyes Media, has been a storyteller for over two decades, first as a magazine writer and then as a documentary filmmaker. She launched Talking Eyes in 2002 as a way to focus on creating visual media that catalyzes positive social change. Her work has appeared on PBS, the Documentary Channel, MediaStorm, National Geographic Magazine and Discovery online, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC.com. Beyond broadcast and publication, Winokur works extensively with nonprofit organizations to develop their messages and put Talking Eyes' films to work at the grassroots level. She has been a National Geographic Explorer and served on the faculty of Rutgers University-Newark and the International Center of Photography in New York.


9:00 PM CENTRAL TIME | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19 

Keynote address   |   Bayeté Ross Smith  

Questioning Our Preexisting Beliefs Through Interactive, Multi-Platform Storytelling  

Bayeté Ross Smith believes that creating scenarios for engagement that are accessible and relevant to the daily lived experience of the general public is a critical point of emphasis and that making use of all types of visual platforms can aid in providing the level of nuance necessary for specific narratives.  This presentation will examine the importance of not telling stories for other people but telling stories with other people and allowing communities some portion of agency and power in how they are represented through visual art & media. Smith, in his work, prefers to address the concept of identity and the framing of information to push people to question their preexisting beliefs as well as making work that is interactive with its audience while also being interactive with the community the narrative focuses on.

BIOGRAPHY

Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer, artist, and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media. He lives in Harlem, New York. He is a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee, a CatchLight Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee and an AmDOC/POV NY Times embedded mediamaker. His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), and America House in (Ukraine), among others.

His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. His work has also been featured at the Sheffield Doc Fest and the L.A. Film Festival. He has also created a series of public art projects with organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Amistad Center, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and The California Judicial Council. His work has been published in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Question Bridge: Black Males in America (2015), Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005), The Spirit Of Family (2002) and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté is a faculty member at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He also helped launch and continues to work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school-based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY that partners with Kings County Hospital.