The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Portland Maine

Our mission is to educate and promote documentary storytellers.

We’re a non-profit school in Portland, Maine offering 15 week or semester-long intensive programs in documentary writing, radio, photography and multimedia with a focus on powerful and responsible storytelling. We also exhibit documentary work in our gallery and host documentary-related events.

Graduate and undergraduate students come from all over the US and other countries for fifteen weeks of intensive field research, workshops and seminars. Throughout the semester, students gather cultural materials and develop their craft to create documentaries of professional caliber.

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.