Laura’s films focus on personal journeys, especially among women in Africa, exploring themes of reconciliation, human resilience and entrepreneurship. Laura serves as the division’s social impact coordinator and director of the Community Voice Lab. Laura Waters Hinson is an award-winning filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Arts Division of the School of Communication. View the latest in our Community Voice Film Series. The project is a proud partner of the Center for Media and Social Impact. Our goal is to promote diversity and inclusion efforts into the learning outcomes of our students as we seek to serve as conscientious citizens of the wider DC community.
Each year, her “Community Documentary” course produces the Community Voice Film Series, an anthology of short documentaries produced by graduate and undergraduate filmmaking students in collaboration with local storytellers. While most of our films are documentaries, some students have applied the principles of collaborative filmmaking in their fiction projects.Ĭommunity Voice Lab is directed by Laura Waters Hinson, an award-winning filmmaker and professor within the Film and Media Arts Division at AU’s School of Communication. Our films primarily focus on storytellers within the Washington, DC area, but we also partner with filmmakers whose projects align with our model of collaborative storytelling and community journalism. The creative ethos of Community Voice is that of collaboration, rather than extraction, in which our filmmakers and local storytellers work together to tell stories of hope, resilience and determination for the common good. The Community Voice Lab produces films that capture the voices of community storytellers too often unseen and unheard.