DURHAM, NC.-The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Radio, will present a weeklong documentary audio institute for participants from across the United States beginning on August 14. Nationally known documentary audio artists Karen Michel and Neenah Ellis will be in Durham to teach at the Institute, and each will present an evening program open to the public, on August 15 and 16, respectively. On August 17, Big Shed co-founder Shea Shackelford will present �If You�re Not Podcasting, You Should Be: Podcasting and Documentary Audio,� an evening devoted to a new Internet technology that allows anyone to easily and cheaply distribute audio content � music, interviews, stories, news accounts, discussions, or anything else that can be captured in sound � to a global audience.

Join us and participate in an ongoing conversation on documentary ethics, community documentary work, and documentary audio. All three programs will begin at 7 p.m.

Hearing Is Believing: An Audio Documentary Summer Institute is a one-week intensive immersion in the tools and techniques of producing a documentary audio piece, one of a number of institutes, workshops, and courses offered by the Center for Documentary Studies. For more information, check the Web at http://cds.aas.duke.edu.

Karen Michel is an upstate New York�based independent radio producer who got her start in media as a guest on Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things. She's lived and worked in Alaska, Mexico, Japan, Greenland, India, Canada, Kenya, Nepal, Madagascar, and other geographies real and imagined. Her academic training is in visual arts and cross-cultural education; she's been an exhibiting artist (jewelry, photography, drawing, and holography) and a teacher. Since falling into a job in public radio in Fairbanks, Alaska, long ago, she's been committed to sound, as an audio artist and as a journalist. She's received many awards and fellowships: Peabody, Robert Wood Johnson, NEA, CPB, NFCB, the Japan Foundation, and the Fulbright/Indo-U.S. Subcommission, among them.

Neenah Ellis is a veteran documentary producer, writer, and editor. She has been a producer and writer for NPR�s All Things Considered and numerous other NPR news and cultural programs. Her freelance work has included films for the National Park Service and The Discovery Channel, a ten-year oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a New York Times best-selling book titled If I Live to Be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians. She is a member of the Association of Independents in Radio and serves as an AIR mentor to new producers. She is the recipient of two radio production grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and her work has won three George Foster Peabody Awards, the Radio-Television News Directors� Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Alfred I. DuPont � Columbia University Award.

Shea Shackelford is a freelance producer living in Washington, D.C. Born and raised in the Tennessee Valley, he spent the first thirty years of his life moving around the country and working as a professional do-gooder. After a few years of experimenting with audio documentaries, he finally succumbed to his love of people, stories, and audio; abandoned his job; and attended the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, in 2004. Since then, he�s been enjoying the mystery and anxiety of charting a new career. One of those endeavors is Big Shed, a new audio documentary channel involved in podcasting that shares good voices, good stories, and good sound production from independent producers, podcasters, and audio artists around the country. Big Shed is a part of IndieFeed (www.indiefeed.com ), an established and growing community of independently produced podcasting content on the web. Shackelford and Jennifer Deer, an audio instructor in the CDS Continuing Studies program, program the Big Shed, which is open to a wide range of submissions and styles.