VISITING DOCUMENTARIAN SERIES
This Visiting Documentarian Series is made possible in part by the Berkley Hudson Visiting Documentarian Fund.
Grace Lee is the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s spring 2026 visiting documentarian.
Grace Lee is an independent filmmaker and podcaster who most recently directed and produced Forever We Are Young, a feature documentary about ARMY, the global fandom of K-Pop superstars BTS. Lee is co-producer of the podcast Viewers Like Us. She also directed and produced two episodes of the Peabody Award-winning Asian Americans series as well as And She Could Be Next, POV’s first broadcast series about women of color transforming politics and civic engagement, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Other credits include the Peabody-winning American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, The Grace Lee Project Makers: Women in Politics, Off The Menu: Asian America, K-Town’92, an interactive online project about the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, as well as American Zombie, a personal horror film, which premiered at Slamdance and SXSW. Grace is also co-founder of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), a Directors Guild of America member, on the board of the International Documentary Association as well as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Elaine McMillion Sheldon (Fall 2025) – Elaine McMillion Sheldon is one of the Center’s visiting documentarians this spring. She will screen her film King Coal. A lyrical tapestry of a place and people, King Coal meditates on the complex history and future of the coal industry, the communities it has shaped, and the myths it has created. While situated in the communities under the reign of King Coal, the film transcends time and place, emphasizing how all are connected through an immersive mosaic of belonging, ritual, and imagination. Emerging from the long shadows of the coal mines, King Coal untangles the pain from the beauty and illuminates the innately human capacity for change.
Elaine McMillion Sheldon is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker based in West Virginia. Known for her intimate, nuanced portrayals of rural communities, she brings an honest, humanizing lens to stories often overlooked by mainstream media. With King Coal, Sheldon continues her exploration of Appalachian culture, drawing audiences into the heart of coal country to see a world beyond stereotypes and headlines.
Watch Elaine’s SouthTalk here.
Angela Tucker sits with Elaine McMillion Sheldon and engage in a Q&A with the audience after Elaine’s film screening.
Sam Pollard (Spring 2025) – Pollard is a feature film and television video editor, as well as a documentary producer-director. In December 2022, the streaming service Peacock started featuring Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, a film Pollard co-directed with filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir. Through first-person accounts and powerful archival footage, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power recounts the local movement and the young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers who fought not only for voting rights but also for Black Power in Lowndes County, Alabama.
In the fall of 2023, HBO premiered South to Black Power, co-directed by Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith. The documentary film features New York Times columnist Charles Blow and draws inspiration from his book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.
Watch Sam’s SouthTalk here.
(Left) Sam Pollard sits nexts with SouthDocs MFA candidate Dr. Cassandra Hawkins and engage in a Q&A with the audience after his film screening. (Right) Event graphic for Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power screening.
Jon-Sesrie Goff (Spring 2024) – Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. Jon has offered his lens to a variety of projects spanning many genres including the award-winning documentaries Spit on the Broom (Black Public Media 2019), Out in the Night (POV, Logo 2015) and Evolution of a Criminal (Independent Lens 2015). Jon is currently the Executive Director of the Flaherty and previously served as the Museum Specialist for Film at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Watch Jon-Sesrie Goff’s SouthTalk here.
Sarah Garrahan (Spring 2023) – Sarah Garrahan (she/her) is a documentary artist and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She is based in Los Angeles, CA. She co-produced and was an additional editor on the hybrid feature documentary The Infiltrators (Sundance Film Festival 2019). She edited the feature documentaries Building the American Dream (SXSW 2019), Silent Beauty (Hot Docs Film Festival 2022), Slumlord Millionaire (DOCNYC 2024) and the short documentaries Status Pending (Al Jazeera),La Isla (The New Yorker) and Love in the Time of Migration (LA Times Short Docs). She is a former Flaherty Fellow, Felsman Fellow and Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellow. In 2023, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. In 2024, she was named one of DOCNYC’s “40 Under 40”. She has served as an editing consultant for the Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, the IDA, and on numerous feature and short films. She holds an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.
Sarah works in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. Find recent and past SouthTalks here.