For more information, find mimesis outside the academy.

American Refuge

        People flee to the upland forests to reinvent themselves after personal and social trauma, but they soon learn that the the American West is a site of eternal return, and the past is always present.

Feature documentary     forthcoming (co-directed with Christian Hammons)

^{Documentary Media Poetics: a handbook for theory and practice}

       Documentary Poetics are the study and practice of documentary arts as a method for building and transforming our world. They allow us to recognize the documentary impulse inherent in all art, an impulse that is driven by experience.

Open Education Resource and Course Handbook
(co-authored with Laurids Sonne)

Rumor

              In a small town, a girl learns that her brothers have kidnapped the bully who drove her fraternal twin to suicide. A story about poverty, race, sexuality, and violence on the high plains.

Short fiction     2019
(co-directed with Christian Hammons)

Messengers

              In 1979, Prof. Dennis Van Gerven exhumed the bodies of 400 Nubian mummies from the desert in Sudan.  They were itinerant farmers in the 6th and 7th centuries BC, but in the three decades after they were excavated, they would go to work again as "messengers from the poor."  At the end of his career, Van Gerven reflects on his life with the mummies and their afterlife in the United States speaking to the problems of poverty and discrimination.

Short documentary     2019
(co-directed with Christian Hammons)