Professor, students produce films for Obama Presidential Center

Though Jeffrey Palmer has created award-winning scripts for both documentaries and feature films, he found that President Barack Obama works best without one.

"He's a master at saying everything way better than the way you write it," said Palmer, associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences, who worked with Obama and his advisers to create two films for the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Three recent Cornell graduates were part of his production team.

A production company approached Palmer - an award-winning filmmaker now working on his second feature documentary - about the project. The team produced two sets of films: "Stories of Service," in which six members of the military tell stories including efforts to save fellow soldiers, their experience recovering from injuries and their campaigns to change military policy; and "Working to Preserve the Planet," focused on the Paris Accords, Obama's executive orders related to climate and the unsolved problems that remain.

"President Obama was very involved and very straightforward. He knew what he wanted, his aesthetic, and he understood who would be going through the museum," Palmer said. "He wanted to connect with everybody."

Because of that, Palmer said, many of the films and displays aren't about Obama, but about the people he worked with and others who inspired him.

Gillian Harrill '22, associate producer on the project, proofread scripts and managed archival material for the films.

"It was such an important experience for me, right after graduating from Cornell, to have a hands-on meeting with Obama's archivist, who showed me the basics of what goes into archival producing," said Harrill, who majored in communication and now works for a company producing documentaries for PBS. "I've used what I learned on this project in so many subsequent jobs in my documentary film career."

Harrill said she feels like she's played a part in shaping American history. "To have something you touched, even lightly, be immortalized in a presidential center for local communities and the world alike to meditate on is a profound privilege," she said. "We rarely get a chance as everyday people to memorialize even the history we lived through, so this was powerful and career-changing."

Kassandra Nguyen '23, M.Eng. '24, was the storyboard artist on the productions, translating Palmer's scripts into storyboards frame by frame.

"I believe that these are important stories that need to be told, not only for educational purposes but also to raise awareness about the importance of active community," Nguyen said. "The films play a meaningful part in inspiring audiences to take action, reflecting the values behind the Obama presidency, and I am proud to be part of it."

"For 'Working to Preserve the Planet,' I got to dig through official archives of young Barack Obama, which was absolute fun," said co-producer Jenny Zhang '23, who worked with producers from the Obama Foundation to hunt down and organize archival materials for both films. "Handling high-stakes media assets under strict [Obama Foundation] guidelines also forced me to build bulletproof tracking systems - a skill set I now carry into every project I touch."

The climate film also included the influence of Obama's mother and his childhood growing up in Hawaii.

"His mother was an anthropologist who instilled in him the importance of understanding other cultures, other places and taking care of the environment, of the land," Palmer said, adding that he was also able to highlight Obama's understanding of Native communities and his work with them on matters of environmental stewardship.

The film shows the resistance Obama faced and the limits of what he was able to accomplish, ending with a pitch to young people to carry on with this work.

"He does feel like this generation, Gen Z, is a generation who can take this on and do the things he was unable to get done," Palmer said.

The film, screening on the museum's fifth floor, is the last one visitors see before leaving the museum.

"It leaves you with the idea there's a lot to do," Palmer said.

Of Palmer's numerous short films, "Isabelle's Garden" won the Bill and Melinda Gates Short Film Challenge at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. His first feature narrative script "Ghosts," based on his short film from 2022, was awarded runner-up for the Writers Guild of America East Fellowship at the 2025 Stowe Story Labs.

In 2019, he completed his first feature film, "N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear," which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on the PBS series, "American Masters." He's now creating his second feature documentary, "Kiowa Voices: The Preservation of Story, Landscape, and Language," a project with his father, Gus Palmer, professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.