Bridging generations through film

As an Artist-in-Residence at Otterbein SeniorLife this past summer, Leah Jackson ’26 connected with her community through film.

Since 2018, Otterbein SeniorLife and Denison have collaborated on the summer Otterbein Artist-in-Residence program, which provides student artists with the opportunity to live at Otterbein, become part of the community, and create arts opportunities for residents.

Jackson shares some insights from her time as an artist-in-residence at Otterbein.

Could you tell me a little about the Artist-in-Residence program?

Many former Denison professors and alumni live at Otterbein, so they’re very connected with the community. They love having young people there, and they love having Denison students.

A lot of my events were based on visual arts or music, but I really wanted to incorporate film into the program since it’s my main area of study. Sometimes, I would bring in an artist or a professor to talk, which helped bring discussion, fresh perspectives, and youthful energy to the community.

What were some activities you held, and how did you come up with them?

I came in with a lot of ideas for different events, and it was just about narrowing them down because there was already such a vibrant community within the arts. My biggest project was a documentary I made about the residents and why people are drawn to arts as they get older.

I would also host film screenings and discuss the movies afterward. I had a cinema professor come in for a lecture on the 50th anniversary of Jaws. We talked about film production and distribution, and how Jaws became the first summer blockbuster.

That was a fun event where they could come but didn’t have to be actively involved. People were really interested in learning about things, but didn’t necessarily want to create something.

What are some things that you learned?

It was a good opportunity to have a long period of time to work on a project. The documentary I made, titled A Life with Art, was probably the longest project that I’ve ever worked on.

On an interpersonal level, I learned so much about the people who live there. It’s so interesting to me that Otterbein is a retirement community like any other, but they happen to have an unusual number of people there who are interested in the arts.

There were a wide variety of artistic interests represented, which included a group of women who met each week for a fiber arts club and a former potter who continues to share his love of pottery by teaching residents, sometimes in their 90s, who have never done anything like that in their lives.

What are some of your biggest takeaways from this experience?

I’m very creative and organized, but I never thought of myself as someone who’s necessarily very good with people. Yet, I think that ended up being my favorite part of living there: getting to work with people and spending enough time with the residents to really get to know them.

One of the things that was most surprising about working with older generations is that you have so much to learn from them, not because they’re older and wiser, but because their experiences are so different from yours. The generational differences and the time periods they lived through, were a whole different world than the one our generation knows.