Biography

Douglas Vuncannon is a visual artist, composer, performer, photographer and writer who has traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In the early 2000s, Vuncannon produced short documentary films that screened at numerous film festivals in the United States and Canada. He has contributed photographs, journalism and criticism to the Independent Weekly and other publications. A multi-instrumentalist with a varied musical background, Vuncannon has primarily focused on double bass and orchestra composition in recent years.

Vuncannon's recently completed projects include Fukushima Travelogue (2015), which consists of writings and photographs from the radioactive ghost towns of Japan, and Sabungeros (Cockfighters) (2017), a series of photographs from the Philippines that was exhibited at Through This Lens in downtown Durham, NC in February and March of 2017. On October 6th, 2017, his Sinfonietta Fukushima, a one-movement satirical tone poem, had its world premiere in Sydney, Australia. It was performed by the sixty-piece Sydney Contemporary Orchestra. In December 2017, Vuncannon photographed one hundred transwomen in Bangkok, Thailand. This project, Ladyboys, will be exhibited in 2019. In the fall of 2018 Vuncannon was commissioned by Downtown Durham Inc. to produce the public space project Portraits in Common with collaborator Wendy Spitzer.

Vuncannon teaches documentary photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.