Photographer and documentary filmmaker Irene Carolina Herrera has been selected to become the fourth Knight Resident Professional. Herrera, 32, was born in Venezuela, raised in Miami, and now lives in Tokyo, Japan, where she is an assistant professor in film and media arts at Temple University, Japan Campus.

Herrera’s work focuses on ways media can lead to social change -- the basis of her recently approved project at the Knight Center, which will look closely at gender equity, identity and human migration.

The program, to take place in the fall, will train migrant Haitian women living in the Dominican Republic to document their lives through digital audio and still photography. The goal is to provide disenfranchised and stateless women with multimedia training that will empower them to tell their own stories.

“Instead of sending journalists over to report on these women, we are teaching these women to report on themselves,” Herrera said. “The whole idea is based on participatory media. They will have access to the technology to be able to tell their own stories and to be able to show their own reality.”

Herrera has led similar programs with female Colombian refugees in Venezuela and Palestinian children in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. However, this is the first time she will add high-level multimedia skills to her repertoire through close collaboration with Knight Chair in Visual Journalism, professor Rich Beckman.

Beckman’s School of Communication students will travel to the Dominican Republic and team up with Dominican students to teach migrant Haitian women how to use multimedia tools to create narratives about their lives, with the expectation of creating visibility for these otherwise forgotten stories.

“I know that our students will learn as much as the participants on this project,” Beckman said. “It is tremendously rewarding to help empower people to communicate, to give them the tools and expertise to be able to tell their own stories. These are important untold stories, and our students will be the critical link in sharing the life experiences of these women with the rest of the world.”

According to the U.S. State Department 2008 Report on Human Rights, there are about one million people of Haitian ancestry who have been born in the Dominican Republic. However, many of them are unable to obtain any official form of identification and therefore enjoy no benefits from the state. They have little or no access to basic services and rights, such as public education, bank accounts or even birth certificates.

“Even if you are born in the Dominican Republic and your parents are Haitian, you don’t have access to citizenship,” Herrera said. “According to the law, you should, but when they go to present the papers, they get caught up in bureaucracy and are never given out. They are basically stateless.”

Sanjeev Chatterjee, Knight Center’s executive director, said he hopes this project will create a model of empowerment for groups of people who otherwise would not be able to tell their stories. “It is not necessary for participants to be literate to share their stories with the world,” Chatterjee said. “Their voices can be recorded in their own language and combined with photographs to make compelling stories.”

The “Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados y Migrantes de la República Dominicana”, an NGO established in the Dominican Republic to accompany, serve and defend the rights of refugees and forcibly displaced people, will be coordinating the selection of the 10 women to receive the multimedia training that will empower them to tell their stories on their own terms.

These stories produced through this effort will become part of the Center's anchor project on world cities.

“The world cities project will focus on the issues relating to the tremendous growth of urban populations around the world,” said Chatterjee, noting that more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities. “People hope to better their lives in cities,” he said. “The stories from Santo Domingo will examine this assumption of betterment in the lives of poor cross-border migrant women.”

The training program, which will run through Dec. 15, will generate a Web site to display the media created by the women and a photographic exhibit in the Dominican Republic. Herrera has a master’s degree in film and television production and is finalizing her Ph.D dissertation in ethnographic visual anthropology and documentary photography, both degrees at Nihon University’s College of Art in Japan.

She is arriving in Miami in August and will be based at the Knight Center throughout the fall semester.

Posted on June 11, 2009