Pioneer of the ‘desktop documentary’ Kevin B. Lee to speak about his craft

Filmmaker, journalist and critic Kevin B. Lee will speak at Yale on Saturday, March 31, as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.

Lee’s talk, entitled “THEORY/PRACTICE: Expanding Scholarship in the Age of Digital Media” and subtitled “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” will take place at 1 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. Lee will dive into the term “desktop documentary” and attempt to answer the question: How does a computer screen explore the world? He will present a selection of his own desktop-based video essays.

Lee has made over 300 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning documentary “Transformers: The Premake,”  called “the best ‘Transformers’ movie ever” by Entertainment Weekly, pioneered the “desktop documentary” form and played in several film festivals worldwide. He is a professor of crossmedia studies, and he teaches at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany. He has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Goethe Universitat Frankfurt.

Lee has written for publications including the New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate, and Indiewire. He was founding editor and chief video essayist at Fandor.

The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was established by Nelson Poynter, who received his master’s degree in 1927 from Yale. The fellowship brings to campus distinguished reporters, editors and others who have made important contributions to the media. Among recent Poynter fellows are Ben Solomon, Ezra Edelman, and Elizabeth Kolbert.