Summer at Appalshop is always a season of movement. Our hallways fill with interns, our studios buzz with new voices, filmmakers head into the field, and neighbors gather to learn, create, and share stories together.
In this month's newsletter, you'll find opportunities to work alongside us through new job openings and internships, celebrate the incredible young people spending their summer at the Shop, and mark your calendars for upcoming performances and film screenings. However you choose to connect, we're grateful you're here and hope you'll be part of what we're building together.
COME WORK WITH US!
Full-time and Internship Opportunities Now Open
As our work continues to grow and expand, so does our need for creative and driven folks to come join our team! Currently, we have two full-time positions and several Stewards VISTA internships available. Read on to learn more about these job opportunities:
If you have ever wanted to work at our radio station WMMT, now is your chance! We have two positions open here at Real People Radio: News Reporter/Producer and General Manager. These are both full-time salary positions based in Whitesburg, KY where our radio studio is located. Learn more about these positions on our Work With Us webpage.
Additionally, we are thrilled to share that we have six VISTA internship positions available through Americorps’ Stewards Individual Placements program! These positions reach across nearly all Appalshop programs, including our Film Department, Appalachian Media Institute, Archive, WMMT, Roadside Theater, and a more generalized Story Collection and Outreach position. If any of these spark your interest, head over to our Work With Us webpage to learn more about each position! [These positions are now closed for new applications.]
An Introduction to Our Many, Many Wonderful Interns
and the great work they're doing!
We are overjoyed to have a wonderful group of passionate interns from various colleges, universities, and programs working with our staff this summer! Joining us both in our offices and virtually, they have been contributing to nearly all corners of Appalshop - from Film and Communications, to Archive and Roadside Theater. While we’d love to dedicate an entire newsletter to each of them, we’ll start by letting them introduce themselves and share a bit about the work they’re doing.
Ramona Pierce is an intern from Danville, KY and a rising senior at Haverford College. Working at the Appalshop archive for the second summer in a row, she is continuing work with the Appalachian Women Writers radio series and the archive’s photography collections, as well as assisting with WMMT’s Calls from Home program.
Rebecca Liu is a rising sophomore at Duke University who is joining Appalshop through the Robertson Scholars Community Summer Internship Program. While at the Shop, she has worked on public health initiatives, including the Prevent Diabetes EKY campaign, as well as archiving historical scripts from our Headwaters television program.
Kirsten Callahan is a recent graduate of the University of Pikeville, double majoring in Film & Media Arts and Communication, and is soon starting her Master’s program at the same university for Strategic Communication. This summer, Kirsten is working with our Communications Department as a Newsletter Content Writer capturing community stories, events, and more.
Isaac McCarthy, a native of Gerrardstown, WV, is a PhD student from Ohio State School of Music with many, many musical accomplishments. Here at Appalshop, he is working in the Archive learning how to preserve and digitize unique magnetic audio recordings as well as writing an essay for the Library of Congress on our Nimrod Workman Collection. Additionally, Isaac played a big role in helping this year’s Seedtime on the Cumberland festival come together.
Grace Dvorak is from Lexington, Kentucky and is working in the Roadside Theater archives during the month of July. She’s excited to be working at Appalshop!
Matthew Rogers is a college student at the University of Pikeville studying Film & Media Arts. This summer, he is working with our Film Department as a Film Caption and Content Assessment intern, helping us ensure our films are meeting WCAG guidelines and collecting data around our film catalog’s recurring themes.
Nora Brown is a musician and student at Yale University who is doing a variety of work with our Archive this summer. Her main project is watching and cataloguing the VHS tapes in the George Gibson Collection, which contains-among other miscellaneous things-raw footage of Gibson’s visits with old-time and bluegrass musicians from Eastern Kentucky and Florida. After the Gibson tapes are catalogued, Nora plans to tackle cataloguing the infamous Jim Webb t-shirt collection.
Walden Martin is a sophomore at the University of Pikeville who is studying Biomedical Science with the hopes of one day becoming a doctor. While here at the Shop, he is working as a Multimedia Content Creator producing mainly short-form video content.
Heather Parks is a Senior studying Media Production and Journalism at Morehead State University. She is working with our Film Department this summer to create educational materials for schools, including study guides, discussion prompts, and lesson plans to go along with Appalshop’s most popular and “widely-used-in-the-classroom” films.
We thank these interns (and the rest of them!) for the passionate work and dedication they have shown our organization and the lasting impact they will leave behind them!
An Update on the Summer Documentary Institute
What Our Filmmaking Interns Have Been Up To
We're over halfway through the Appalachian Media Institute’s Summer Lab, and we have so much to share with y’all! Over the past five weeks, our interns have been hard at work learning to make media about our region from the ground up. So far they've produced a total of nine individual short films, from covering local people and businesses, to making up their own narrative stories.
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- Interns Emma Gilley, Rin Epling, and Samson Mcneely are producing a documentary about Appalachian folks and the connection that grounds them in the mountains.
- Interns Jacob Brown, Maddox Fugate, and Ray Pettway are producing a documentary about local & regional wrestling and the culture that surrounds it.
- Interns Riley Kate, Aria Wolford, and Scotty North are producing a documentary about the impact of kudzu within our region and the various artistic responses that have come from it.
Team Sunshine Performance presents The Great American Gunshow: Coalfields
Our friends from Team Sunshine Performance are back and bringing The Great American Gunshow: Coalfields to Eastern Kentucky! This original work will run from October 15-17, 2026 in Whitesburg, KY. [Performance venue and times still to be determined.]
The Great American Gunshow: Coalfields is an interview-informed performance exploring American gun culture, gun violence and trauma, and the tension within our society over the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” This performance documents, maps, archives and reflects our collective experience through a theatrical presentation designed as a unique hybrid of a live performance event and a participatory forum, created by Team Sunshine Performance through 75+ hours of interviews with Appalachian people. Gunshow explores the humanity at the heart of the issues surrounding guns and invites audiences to engage in a more nuanced discussion. Together, performers and audience work to understand the overwhelm, confusion, frustration, and exhaustion that comes with these issues as a way to imagine a future for Appalachia.
Team Sunshine Co-Artistic Director Makoto Hirano, along with co-creator Jackie Soro and community performers, guide the audience through an interactive performance event that explores complex issues particularly relevant to Appalachia—the impact of gun violence, the intersection of drugs and firearms, incarceration and re-entry, and how vulnerable many Appalachians are to violence. Created and directed by Alex Torra, Gunshow is ultimately a basic action of listening and reflecting, transforming a set of interviews into an understanding of how we got to this collective moment and what it might take to achieve a more prosperous future for our region.
The Great American Gunshow: Coalfields is just one piece of a much larger initiative. Inspired to create this show by his own relationship to gun culture, Lead Artist Makoto Hirano, along with members of Team Sunshine Performance, are embarking on a journey to cities and towns across the U.S. to understand the role of guns in different communities. By interviewing a variety of individuals with varying experiences and opinions about guns, the project ultimately seeks to create reflective experiences in each locale and also create a tether between different U.S. communities in the hopes of understanding of how we got to this moment and where we go from here.
The Pilot Phase of this project was created in collaboration with Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Unique, location-specific iterations of the project are being developed and presented in New Orleans, Hudson (NY), and Whitesburg (KY). Appalshop is so glad to be a part of this educational and engaging theatrical experience!
Summer Documentary Institute Final Films Screening
Written in Collaboration with Summer Intern Kirsten Callahan
If you are new around here, you may not know that the end of July is always an exciting time at Appalshop. As the month comes to a close, so does our annual Summer Documentary Institute (SDI) program.
This intensive (but fun!) eight-week summer internship brings together creative young people ages 14 to 22 from across the Appalachian region. Requiring no prior filmmaking experience, we provide hands-on technical training from day one and spend the first four weeks of the program learning how to produce a film. During the final four weeks is when our interns take full creative control - pitching, capturing, and editing together their own original short documentary films. While we're always sad to see our youth filmmakers head home, the end of another SDI also means something worth celebrating: a brand-new collection of youth-produced films to share with our community!
We hope you will join us Saturday August 1st at the WMMT Studio (253A E Main Street, Whitesburg, KY 41858) for the premiere screening of the 2026 Summer Documentary Institute films! Stay up-to-date on Appalshop’s and the Appalachian Media Institute’s socials for more details to come.
2026 Seedtime Merch Now Available!
You’ve asked, and it’s here: the 2026 Seedtime on the Cumberland merch is now available on our online store! Get yourself and a friend a t-shirt, poster, tote bag, and some stickers all featuring this summer’s custom poster design by John Haywood. Act fast because once these items are gone, they’re gone!