As a journalist, I don’t usually identify as an artist or an abstract thinker. On the contrary, I document reality and life as it happens around me, rather than create or interpret it. But with a journalist’s innate curiosity, I’ve found myself drawn to the theory behind the project, and indeed answering the question, “What is art supposed to do?”

This is one of five pieces I produced for the News21 Carnegie-Knight Foundation Fellowship. Photos by Bob Miller.

Photo credit: Bob Miller for News21: El Nuevo Normal  

As seen on El Nuevo Normal, syracuse.news21.com/2011

Most Friday afternoons, Manny Cepeda speeds east on the highway toward New York City in a white passenger van.

Inside, he and seven other travelers chatter in rapid-fire Spanish while listening to upbeat …

Click here to read the accompanying story: Education en Español, the Future of Our Public Schools, to find out more about how Noe will not be the exception much longer.

The Pinochet Project is a journalist’s rendition of the Chilean memory struggle after the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, left office in 1990.  Last summer, May-August 2010, I spent three months in Chile, interviewing subjects and reporting for the English-language newspaper, …

The Academic

Steve Stern: A history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stern specializes in historical memory and political violence in Latin America. I was first introduced to his work in Chile when I read an excerpt from “Remembering Pinochet’s …

Most Chileans acknowledge that Pinochet’s regime captured and tortured people that were a perceived threat to the government. What they don’t know is that their office building, bank or gym building may have once been used as torture center. More …

Hermogenes Peréz del Arce and Chile’s Military Academy: Memory As Salvation

Steve Stern, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divided Chile’s historical memory into four camps: salvation, persecution, the open wound, and the closed box. Although all four exist …

View a slideshow of my Istanbul whirlwind adventure.

Traveling again…this time it’s the Euro-Asian cosmopolitan contradiction of Istanbul, Turkey.  My first trip to either continent and already the sights and sounds are a mix of the old and the new, the developing and the developed; walking side by …