The Southern Documentary Project is an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and shares the Center’s core mission to document, interpret, and teach about the U.S. South through critical research and public engagement. In addition to telling our own complicated stories about the South, the Southern Documentary Project staff is equally focused on training the next generation of storytellers.
SouthDocs teaches and mentors undergraduate and graduate students in the Southern Studies academic programs. Students come to the program with a range of backgrounds and experiences in visual storytelling. Some have never used a camera before and others are experienced filmmakers interested in applying their craft to telling the stories of the South. Southern Studies graduate students can pursue a documentary track MA degree as well as an MFA in Documentary Expression. Each semester we show off our student work in a documentary showcase that shows the full scope of our programs.
Commitment to Community Engagement
The Southern Documentary Project is an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, whose mission statement can be found here. For SouthDocs, that affiliation means a commitment to providing space for multiple stories and storytellers. That commitment begins with our staff who are not only exemplary storytellers, but who also represent different communities and experiences from around the South. It is our belief that a staff who truly reflects the richness of our region will also attract talented students with a desire to do the same. As we look to the future, SouthDocs is also committed to seeking collaborators throughout the region to help us identify and tell stories within their communities. Actively engaging specific partners throughout the South and helping them tell their own unique stories is our clearest example of a commitment to community engagement.
WHO WE ARE
Affiliated Faculty + Filmmakers
Annemarie Anderson – Assistant Professor of Practice and SFA Lead Oral Historian
A Florida native, Annemarie Anderson, is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s oral historian and travels across the South collecting stories of people who grow, cook, eat, and serve southern food.
Areas of focus: Florida history and developing a visual documentary practice
ANNEMARIE’S PROJECTS
Zaire Love – Producer/Director + Adj Asst Professor of Southern Culture + Pihakis Doc Filmmaker (SFA)
Love [azairelovejunt] is an award-winning filmmaker, music maker, writer, and educator whose mission is to honor, amplify, and immortalize the stories and voices of the Black South focusing most of her work in Memphis, TN, and Mississippi. While Zaire’s work extends beyond the Black South, bringing honor to it, its people, its traditions, and its cultures in the past, present, and future is her life’s work.
John Rash – Assistant Prof of Film Production & Southern Studies
John Rash is a filmmaker, photographer, and video artist who has worked as visual storyteller and educator in the U.S. and China.
Founder / curator of the Southern Punk Archive, Rash works to preserve the music, stories, and ephemera from vibrant D.I.Y. punk and hardcore communities throughout the American South. His creative work explores cultural outsiders and environmental topics through lens-based media as informed by documentary traditions.
JOHN’S PROJECTS
MFA + MA ALUM
Lucy Gaines – (MFA 2024) Lucy Gaines is a writer, creative director, and brand strategist specializing in multimedia storytelling and comprehensive marketing. She practices film, photography, and writing with an emphasis on revisioning sense of place for the present environment. Currently, Lucy is the Executive Director of Thacker Mountain Radio Hour. Her previous positions include Assistant Directorships at the Oxford Film Festival and the Oxford Conference for the Book.
Lilly Slaughter (MFA 2023) – is the Funding Navigator Associate for the Water Team at EPIC. Lilly has spent the last decade working in sustainable food systems, including gleaning programs, community education, and organic farming. Her work has been influenced by a desire to create safe and equitable communities through food access. Prior to joining EPIC, Lilly completed a MA in Southern Studies and MFA in Documentary Expression at the University of Mississippi, focusing on agricultural labor history and transnational practices specifically between Kentucky and Western Mexico.
Andrea Morales (MFA 2021) – Andrea Morales is a documentary photographer, journalist and educator born in Peru, raised in Miami, now living and working in Memphis, Tennessee. Her personal work attempts to lens the issues of displacement, disruption and magic. Adding glimpses of daily life, meaningful or mundane, to the record through photography is central to her practice.
She has worked as a photojournalist in newsrooms small and large, such as The Concord Monitor, The Lima News and The New York Times, with equal enthusiasm. She’s also worked at the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project with students in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
In Memphis, she currently serves as the visual director at MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis reporting from the intersection of power, poverty and public policy along. Her work has been exhibited across the country and is held in public and private collections including The Do Good Fund, Memphis International Airport, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
Zaire Love – (MFA 2020) is an award-winning filmmaker, music maker, writer, and educator whose mission is to honor, amplify, and immortalize the stories and voices of the Black South focusing most of her work in Memphis, TN, and Mississippi. While Zaire’s work extends beyond the Black South, bringing honor to it, its people, its traditions, and its cultures in the past, present, and future is her life’s work.
Zaire has been awarded honors at multiple film festivals, made history by being the first filmmaker to ever win Best Hometowner Documentary Short and Best Hometowner Narrative Short at the Indie Memphis in the same year [2023], created work for PBS, and granted the If/Then and HULU grant to produce her award-winning short documentary, SLICE, which is now a The New Yorker Documentary. Her work has also been featured on STARZ and Raedio.
Zaire Love is a graduate of Spelman College [BA], Houston Baptist University [M. Ed], and the University of Mississippi [MFA]. She directs the Southern Foodways Alliance film program and is the Creative Director at Scalawag Magazine. She is writing new narrative scripts and exploring new documentary ideas with her studio, Creative Cornbread.
Kate Medley – is a visual journalist based in North Carolina, whose work across the American South focuses on storytelling and environmental portraiture, often exploring issues of social justice and the shifting politics of this region. She is the author of THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN, a photo book that explores gas stations and convenience stores as unexpected hubs of community, culture, and connection in the South. The book was a finalist for the James Beard Award, named a Best Book of the Year 2024 by NPR, and received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Prize.
Kate’s roots are in Mississippi, where she has investigated Civil Rights -era cold cases, covered the devastating impacts of Hurricane Katrina, and explored the cultural relevance of hot tamales and Koolicles in the Mississippi Delta. In addition to her editorial work, she spent ten years leading brand storytelling at Whole Foods Market and is the founder of Medley Media, a documentary and commercial production company.
Today, Kate lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two children. She serves on the board of the Durham Library Foundation and as a judge for the James Beard Awards. She is a member of Women Photograph and the National Press Photographers Association. She holds certifications in drone operation and hostile environment safety. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, and AARP.
Jonathan P. Smith (MFA 2019) – is a documentary filmmaker. He has produced several shorts, such as “Taming the Tarasque and the recently completed “Sweet Sorghum”. He received a Magnifying Glass Grant for his film “Remembering Elwood Higginbottom”, about the impact of a lynching memorial in Oxford, MS on the family of the victim. This film was a selection of the Oxford Film Festival in 2019 and aired on WNET in New York in 2019.
He has served as a mentor through the local community media center for first-time documentary projects and provided drone and camera work for other films, such as the drone footage for the memorial service in “Negro Terror”.