Workshop Participants
Torsten Kjellstrand
Educator, Photographer, Cinematographer
A native of Sweden, Torsten Kjellstrand comes to academia after 25 years of work as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. He worked at The Herald in Jasper, Indiana, where he was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year by the POYi. While working at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, then The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, he was recognized for a broad range of work, from Lowell Thomas Awards for travel writing and photography to an Overseas Press Club Award for foreign news.
Throughout his journalism career, Kjellstrand has tried to tell stories that go beyond and challenge stereotyping in rural, Native American, and immigrant communities. He cut his narrative teeth as an English major at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. He spent a year as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2003-04 studying links between ethnicity, language, landscape, and storytelling. He then worked as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in New York City before coming to Eugene in 2013.
Torsten participated in the March 2011 MediaStorm Storytelling Workshop. He also participated in the October 2019 MediaStorm Methodology Workshop. He had the following to say about his experiences:
I came to MediaStorm thinking that I needed to learn technical stuff - how to use microphones and DSLRs and software and whatever new gizmo just fell from the sky. I did learn a lot about those crucial tools, but the most important thing that happened during the week was that my love, and enthusiasm, for visual storytelling woke up and came out to play. I haven't been as excited about my work for years and years. It's hard to believe until you see it, but the MediaStorm team really does want us all to get better, to tell real stories, thrive, succeed, smile like we’re in love. I think our whole team did just that: fall in love with storytelling all over again.
The MediaStorm folks expected and celebrated going into our complicated world to discover real people with meaningful stories, tenderly gathered and truthfully told. They also expected us to work really hard - and they matched our efforts by working every bit as hard. And that's the other thing about this workshop: you learn how important it is to be an effective, respectful member of a team. It was incredible to work not only with the big heads at MediaStorm, but also with talented storytellers from other parts of our world. It's simply fun to work alongside people whose work is so good it makes the hair on the back of your neck dance with joy.
This workshop is the antidote to the dumb-it-down journalism taking over too much of our profession. MediaStorm convinced me that we have to master our new tools because doing so makes us better, more sophisticated, more robust conduits for stories that matter.
Using humor and a love of fantasy, "The Amazing Amy" Harlib connects with audiences through performing strenuous yoga-based contortion acts in New York City.