UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art

Shawn Wen and Hyatt Michaels' short film “Hair is Alive” screened at MoMA as a part of the Documenting Mythologies Project.

We’d like to congratulate 2010 Union Docs Collaborative participant Shawn Wen for earning a coveted, prestigious internship position at This American Life.  “As long as I’ve known about the radio show, I’ve known about the internship,” says Wen.  “It’s really wild to me that I got it, the chances were so small.”  This American Life offers only two six-month internship positions a year.  The 50-60 hour workweek includes an dizzying array tasks, from copy editing and administrative duties, to producing weekly promos and short interviews.  “I have no clue what it’s going to be like,” admits Wen, but she nonetheless feels her experience with the collaborative is not dissimilar to her future with This American Life.  The point is “to make work that we want to see in the world.  Both Union Docs and the internship are ways of exercising that.”