As a documentary filmmaker, I have worked across numerous projects with development organizations, educational institutions, and arts and culture institutions. As someone who has a deep passion for meaningful youth engagement in visual arts and culture, I have taught and mentored many students and emerging makers. Across these two disciplines, I keep noticing an immense possibility: each group has something the other can benefit from.

Arts and culture institutions have unique access to rich and diverse creative materials, processes, presentations, and programs. Most already capture audiovisual material for exhibitions, promotion, or audience engagement. Oftentimes, parts of those stories remain unseen and untold. Raw footage sits in archives. Behind-the-scenes creative processes go undocumented beyond promotional needs.

Students and youth studying and working in media, on the other hand, are looking for, and can truly benefit from, access to interesting subject matters and experience of working on real-world projects and ideas.

StoryLab is a way to connect these opportunities to create a collaboration where institutions with rich projects can open their doors, and students can develop their voice. The institutions gain a meaningful pathway to meet their educational mandate and achieve higher youth engagement, and students gain new perspectives and hands-on learning and experience.

I can work with arts and culture institutions to identify storytelling opportunities within their existing programs, exhibitions, performances, events, and educational partnerships.

For arts and media students, existing partnerships between arts institutions and college and university programs can be mobilized to create project-based opportunities and a coaching framework to provide students access to behind-the-scenes creative processes and develop short audio, visual, or audiovisual stories under the guidance of experienced professionals.

For institutions, this can create a continuous pipeline of fresh talent engaged in telling stories about their work, impact, artists, audiences, and creative communities. It can also help expand documentation beyond marketing content, creating a richer archive of public engagement, learning, and cultural life.