doc|UWM is the documentary media center in UWM’s Peck School of the Arts Film, Video, Animation and New Genres Department that bridges academics with real world experience and gives students the unique opportunity to work on professional productions. Students and affiliated faculty collaborate on short form videos that raise awareness about a variety of contemporary political and social well as feature-length documentaries for public television broadcast.
Our videos touch on diverse subjects such as elder abuse and fraud, contemporary poetry and animation, freshwater researchers, Hmong culture, Latinos in agriculture, a successful inner city track team, music documentaries, unique Milwaukee neighborhoods, water stewardship and conservation, racism and mass incarceration.
Funding sponsors have included The National Poetry Foundation, Milwaukee County Department on Aging, Peace Learning Center, StoryCorps, The Coalition for Jewish Learning, The Helen Bader Foundation, The Wisconsin Preservation Fund, David & Julia Uihlein Charitable Foundation, the Herzfeld Foundation, On The Commons, the ACLU of Wisconsin, Milwaukee County Library System, among others.
Projects
Cream City Soundcheck brings together the very best of the Milwaukee music scene with the city’s historical and cultural landscapes to create an original music video project. A creative video series produced by students of UW-Milwaukee each short video chronicles bands as they explore diverse places and perform at popular music venues throughout the city. Designed as a way for Film, Video, Animation and New Genres students to learn professional documentary skills through creative and practical application, the production of Cream City Soundcheck is overseen by doc|UWM – the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s documentary center, housed inside the Peck School of the Arts Film, Video, Animation and New Genres Department.
Milwaukee Water Commons is a cross-city network that fosters connection, collaboration and broad community leadership on behalf of our waters. We promote stewardship of, equitable access to and shared decision-making for our common waters.
Transforming Justice is conducting action research on mass criminalization and incarceration designed to re-frame dominant understandings of security, justice, and community health. We aim not only to document and “give voice” to these issues, but also to help develop strategies for re-defining security and health from the perspectives of individuals and communities directly affected by these forces on the ground. doc|UWM students are helping to Create a Grassroots History of Mass Criminalization in Milwaukee through recording a series of Workshops for Liberation, working on a Youth Video Collective collaborative documentaries, and Digital Public Archives.
Faculty
Sean Kafer
Education
MFA & BFA, Film, UW-Milwaukee
Biography
Sean Kafer is the Program Director of doc|UWM, a filmmaker and Lecturer at UW-Milwaukee in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres. Primarily he works is in documentary but occasionally creates experimental narrative films, video installation, and photography. Sean is currently working on a feature documentary following the justice group The Peoples Revolution with his company Bullhorn Films. He has a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and a Master's in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.