YASS! Masterclass: Mitra Kaboli – Behind the scenes of Welcome to Provincetown
Behind the scenes of Welcome to Provincetown is YASS! 2022 second online masterclass.
It was recorded on November 17th 2022.
In this generous behind-the-scenes review of Welcome to Provincetown, Mitra Kaboli talked about the challenges and choices that have accompanied her over a year of work. She also shared about the tremendous editing work and sorting through the hundreds of hours of tape [name your files!!!] of how she constructed the narrative arc in this multi-voice story, but also about her personal emotional engagement.
Mitra Kaboli is an award-winning audio documentarian and multimedia artist who has been working professionally in radio and podcasting since 2012. Her work has been featured on The Heart, NPR’s Latino USA, Making Contact, ESPN’s 30 for 30 and Audible Productions. Between the summer of 2021 and 2022, she worked on Welcome to Provincetown, a podcast produced by Stitcher in collaboration with Rococo Punch and Room Tone.
In 2021, when Ben Riskin – one of the founders of Room Tone – asked her to work on a series about Provincetown, Mitra Kaboli did not expect to move there for the whole summer. Too good to be true. And yet… PTown – the Massachusetts beach town best known for its popularity in the LGBTQ+ community – welcomed her.
Welcome to Provincetown is a series somewhere between the immediacy of a reality show and the multifaceted depth of the best documentaries: it is an extraordinary example of how a distinctive auteur like Mitra Kaboli can put herself at the service of other people’s stories in order to sketch a portrait that is ultimately and exquisitely collective.