Sarah Riazati is a documentary artist who uses moving images and computational techniques to tell true stories that build bridges between unexpected connections. She is a graduate of the School of Media and Journalism at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked on interactive storytelling projects that won awards from College Photographer of the Year and SXSW Interactive Awards. In 2014, she was a filmmaking resident at Fabrica Communications Research Centre in Treviso, Italy. She gained professional experience as a video and interactive producer for New York–based creative agencies, editorial outlets, and production companies before beginning a freelance filmmaking and design business based in North Carolina. She has taught courses in digital storytelling, ethics, and web development at UNC-Chapel Hill, and she is a current MFA candidate in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
There is no static history. It lives on, layered in the landscape, painted on the brick mills. Through investigating the ripples of the words and deeds of local postbellum industrialist Julian Shakespeare Carr, paradoxically called “the most generous white supremacist,” and reenacting scenes from the childhood of Pauli Murray, an unsung civil and women’s rights activist, the film scratches away at surfaces of stories about Durham, North Carolina.