Thanks to the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant, we have had the good fortune to be able to add to our crew several very talented media archivists to assist with discovering and gathering older audio and visual footage, and with transcribing footage that we have ourselves recorded since 2011. Erica Titkemeyer has been digging for archival footage at institutions like the National Archives and Records Administration, Texas Tech University Virtual Vietnam Read More ...
American Communion Director-Producer Beatrice Jauregui has a photo caption from one of our Vietnam war veterans, Ken Bruce, published as part of a collaborative visual essay titled Soldier Exposures and Technical Publics. Meanwhile, the American Communion team is continuing to film with veterans and their families, and beginning to move into the editing stages. We will have more selected scenes available soon, and are also in the early stages of planning Read More ...
In collaboration with Gala True and the Veterans Administration, we filmed at a new exhibit of the Photovoice project titled From War to Home: Through a Veterans Lens, which opened at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center on November 13, 2012, and runs through February 2013. The exhibit features photographs taken by forty veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, which are captioned with quotes from interviews with the veterans themselves, Read More ...
Lamont B. Steptoe has been writing since his youth, and composed poetry throughout his tour in Vietnam. An avid writer, photographer and activist living in Philadelphia, he has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry. He sits on the advisory board of Warrior Writers, and was a fellow at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Lamont talks with us about his memories of his fellow veterans, the particular Read More ...
The American Communion crew is delighted to announce that we have received a grant for film research and production as part of the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme. This generous show of support is most aptly timed, as it coincides with the lead up to Veteran’s Day 2012.
We have begun collaborating with Warrior Writers, a collective dedicated to bearing witness to the experiences of war veterans and healing through artistic expression. This past weekend, Warrior Writers held a Veterans and Community Conference, which was co-sponsored by the University City Arts League in West Philadelphia, and included a series of workshops for veterans and civilian allies on writing, art-making, and various veterans issues. Anand teamed up with Jon Olshefski Read More ...
Pushing the bounds of American Communion further, we conducted our first film shoot with active soldiers and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery (1-108 FA) of the 56th Stryker Brigade, Pennsylvania Army Reserve National Guard, allowed us to film during training exercises at Fort Pickett, VA, and get a sense of how their experiences with the conflicts in Iraq (where they deployed in Read More ...