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Our Purpose »To educate and promote documentary storytellers.
[ And to push our students to do work that makes their documentary hero's jaw drop. ]
Our Approach »
Experiential. Expeditionary. Intense. Collaborative.
Our Students »
Driven. Passionate. Curious to the brink of obsession.
Our Program »
15 weeks. Radio. Writing. Photography. Multimedia. Collaborations. Stories. People. Landscape. Maine.
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More About Us »
We're a non-profit school in Portland, Maine offering semester intensive programs in documentary writing, radio, and photography, and all with an additional focus on powerful and responsible storytelling, collaboration and multimedia work in a variety of mediums.We also exhibit documentary work in our gallery and host documentary-related events in our cozy auditorium.
Graduate and undergraduate students come from all over the US as well as other countries for fifteen weeks of intensive field research coupled with workshops and seminars. Throughout the semester, students gather cultural materials and develop their craft in order to create documentaries of professional caliber. While the immediate focus and location is Maine, approaches and skills learned at Salt travel well to any regional study or to comparative studies.
What Salt does has been called ethnography, cultural journalism, oral history, folklore, qualitative sociology, documentary photography, visual anthropology, and non-fiction writing. But we are less concerned about what to call what we do than how we do it.
"Salt is rising at the crack of dawn to sit in the branches of a Maine forest, zipped up in camouflage, smelling of doe urine buck lure, listening for the sound of cracking branches, and trying not to make a sound as you scribble notes in the darkness, hang from the trees to snap photos, and pray for a deer to approach so you can shoot it through the vitalsÑand have some grisly meat for your story."
- Salt Writing Student, Caitlin Van Dusen
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Our Non-Discrimination Policy »
Salt provides equal opportunities to all program applicants with respect to admissions, facilities and programs, and financial assistance without regard to race, color, religion, sex, creed, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, alienage, age, disability, marital status, ancestry or any other category protected under federal, state, or local law. Salt complies with applicable state and local laws governing non-discrimination. Salt also expressly prohibits any form of harassment based on race, color, religion, sex, creed, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, alienage, age, disability, marital status, ancestry or any other category protected under federal, state, or local law.