NORA M. ALTER received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana University Press), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (University of Michigan Press), Chris Marker (University of Illinois Press) and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (Berghahn Books). She has published over fifty essays on a broad range of topics including Film and Media Studies, German and European Studies Cultural and Visual studies and Contemporary Art. She has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005, she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. From 2008–10 she was elected President of the Coalition of Women in German. She currently serves on the editorial board of The German Quarterly. She is completing a new book on the international essay film and has begun research on a new study devoted to sound.
Her teaching and research have been focused on twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective.
Assistant Professor ALLAN BARBER is a graduate of Temple’s MFA Program in Film & Television. He is the Coordinator of SCT’s Los Angeles Internship Program, which places approximately forty student interns in the film and television industry each year. On Temple’s main campus, he teaches foundation courses in Media Arts aesthetics and production, and middle to advanced courses in screenwriting, film history and criticism. Professor Barber has served as the Faculty Director of Temple’s London Program, the Department’s Honors Program, as one of the faculty advisors for TUSFVA (Temple University Student Film & Video Association), and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the University Film and Video Association.
WARREN BASS is an independent filmmaker and a full professor teaching directing, cinematography, videography and advanced documentary and fiction film workshops. He was trained at the Yale School of Drama in directing and at Columbia University in film and documentary as their School of the Arts Scholar. He has taught at Yale, NYU, the State University of California, and the American Film Institute; has chaired university departments in Film, Television, and Theater in New England; and has served as Vice President of the University Film and Video Association editor of The Journal of Film and Video, and for extended periods of time as Director of Temple University’s Graduate Program in Film & Television. He has directed theater at Lincoln Center, off-Broadway and in regional professional theater including the world premiere of the musical drama Copernicus at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia. His film and video productions have been aired on PBS, syndicated television and cable in the U.S. and on European, Asian and Australian Television. His work has received over 100 regional, national and international awards including the Platinum Award (First Place), Houston Worldfest; First Place, Athens International; First Place, First Glance; 1st and 2nd Places, New Haven International; Canadian International (Toronto); Rochester International; The British Animation Awards London; and the UFVA Award of Merit. Official Selections include Oberhausen, Budapest, Liepzig, Montreal, DeReel, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, St. Johns, and Uppsala in a total of 15 countries over the past six years; seven public television grants in the past six years, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2003 and 2005. Professor Bass is a recipient of Temple’s Great Teacher Award.His 2007-2008 productions include: At the Wall (45 minutes) a “people’s history” of the protesters who struggled against racial injustice and clashed daily with up to a thousand of Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia police force in an important milestone of the civil rights movement; Art of the Advocate (26 minutes) on murals and radical politics; Tsunami Stories (60 minutes, director, camera, editor) on the tsunami that claimed 240,000 lives from the perspective of those who lived through it; and Labyrinth, a five minute experimental animation. At the Wall has received eighteen broadcasts and recognition in twelve international film festivals including: Athens International, Black Maria Director’s Citation, Boston Motion Picture Awards, Canadian Independent (Toronto), DeReel International (Australia), First Glance, Rochester International, Rockport, SAIFF, San Diego, Trenton, and Utopia.
CHRIS CAGLE is an Assistant Professor of film history and theory in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University. His research interests include postwar Hollywood cinema, social theory, and documentary studies. His article, “Two Modes of Prestige Film,” was the 2006/2007 winner of the Screen Journal award, and he has essays in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (Rutgers), Media Convergence History (Routledge), American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (University of Georgia Press) and the forthcoming Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, vol 2 (Wallflower Press). He is currently working on a book-length study on the Hollywood social problem film, tracing the genre’s industrial economics, public sphere aspirations, and sociology of taste. His weblog, Category D, showcases research in progress and discusses disciplinary issues in film and media studies.
RODERICK COOVER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University (1989), an M.A. in English with a specialization in cross-cultural film and performance from Brown University (1994) and a Ph.D. in the History of Culture with a specialization in media arts and anthropology from the University of Chicago (1999). His documentary and experimental films and new media works have been featured at festivals, exhibitions, and conferences including the Sonoma Wine Country Film Festival, M.I.T, and Milwaukee’s Center for 20th Century Studies. Coover’s papers have been published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, and Visual Anthropology. He presents his work internationally and was the Luso-American Foundation speaker at the European conference Working Images. He was also a plenary speaker at the Whitney Museum-University of Colorado conference, Rethinking the Visual. His awards include a USIA Hays-Fulbright Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, a Chicago Group on Modern France Fellowship, and an LEF foundation grant. Professor Coover teaches a wide range of courses that integrate production and theory with an emphasis on cross-cultural and experimental production methods. These include courses in cinematography, post-production, digital narratives, and visual theory. His courses, which combine critique, group and individual project work, screenings, and readings from across the disciplines, challenge students to test issues of film and media theory through original and innovative productions. Discover more about Dr. Coover at his website.
Visiting Assistant Professor FRANKLIN CASON JR. teaches media production, film theory, and film history courses. He received a PhD in English with a specialization in film theory from the University of Florida, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A practitioner and theorist of film and video, he also served as an adjunct faculty member at Hunter College from 2007-2009, and Queen’s College during the 2009-2010 academic years. His research interests have been primarily concerned with film, modern visual culture, and media studies. As such, his research, writing, and artistic practice reaches across the disciplines of art history, film studies, digital multimedia, graphic novels, philosophy, sociology, literature, musicology, aesthetic theory, visual studies, and historical poetics. Drawing on his experience as an artist, writer, and filmmaker, his current research explores aesthetics, cinematic excess, and an improvisational approach to film analysis, in order to reconsider the role of aesthetics in African-American cinema, encouraging a different set of discussions.
PETER D’AGOSTINO is professor of Film and Media Arts and director of the NewTechLab, teaching new media and experimental video courses. His pioneering video and interactive projects have been exhibited internationally in the form of installations, performances, telecommunications events, and broadcast productions. Recent surveys of his work include: Interactivity and Intervention, 1978-99 exhibited at the Lehman College Art Gallery, New York; and, Between Earth & Sky, 1973 / 2003 at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne. Major group exhibitions include: The Whitney Museum of American Art (Biennial, and The American Century – Film and Video in America 1950-2000), the Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, and the Kwangju Biennial, Korea. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. Professor d’Agostino is a Fulbright Scholar (Brazil, 1996; Australia, 2003) currently serving on the senior specialist roster to 2005. He has also been awarded grants and fellowships from: the National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Pew Trusts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT. He was an artist-in-residence at the TV Laboratory, WNET, New York, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Italy as well as a visiting artist at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications, University of Illinois, and the American Academy in Rome. His installations TransmissionS: In the WELL and VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality received honorary awards for interactive art in 1990 and 1995 at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. D’Agostino’s books include: Transmission: toward a post-television culture, The Un/Necessary Image and TeleGuide — a Proposal for QUBE. He is also a contributor to Illuminating Video, and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Recent publications featuring his work include Telematic Embrace: visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness, Video Art, and Digital Art. Read more about Professor d’Agostino on his website, www.peterdagostino.net.
SARAH DRURY is an Associate Professor at Temple University’s Film & Media Arts Program. She received a BA from Barnard College, an MPS at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and an MA in Photography at the joint program of the International Center of Photography and NYU. She is a new media artist working with interactive video song and lyrical narrative in forms including performative installation, wearable interfaces, interactive video and the artist’s book. Her installations, including The Listening Microphone, Voicebox, Vocalalia and Intervention Chants, explore the expressive qualities of the voice in interaction with video and sound. She has received grants including an NEA Artists Fellowship and from the TU Vice Provost’s Research Initiative. Her work has been presented in national and international venues such as ISEA 2002, ACM Multimedia ’98, Performative Sites 2001, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kitchen, Artists Space, Hallwalls, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Worldwide Video Festival at the Hague and on PBS. Recent works include media design for Violet Fire: a Multimedia Opera about Nikola Tesla, collaborating with filmmaker Jen Simmons, which includes interactive projections responding to the voices of opera singers. Her work on translating the energetic and sonic qualities of the voice into visual images led her to the design of assistive devices that use voice and movement input to enhance expressive possibilities for people with disabilities. Drury has been a faculty member of the NYU Art & Media Program and served on the faculty of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. Discover more about Professor Drury at her website, www.sarahdrury.net.
LEANN ERICKSON is Associate Professor of film and video production at Temple University in the Department of Film and Media Arts and has been an independent video/filmmaker for over 20 years. Her work has appeared on public and cable television, in media and art galleries, and has won national and international recognition in video/film festivals.Titles include:
Experimental videos: Folk Songs (2007); hours, minutes, seconds, frame (1999) and Essential Things (1997). Animation work: Fun Days with Jake (2002) and bees, a documentary (2001). Documentary work: Folk Songs (2007); Neighbor Ladies (2005) and From One Place to Another (1996).
Festival screenings include:
Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival (Toronto CN), Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany), Feminale International Women’s Film Festival (Cologne, Germany), Women in the Director’s Chair (Chicago) and L’immagine Leggera: International Competition of Videoart and Experimental Film (Palermo, Italy).
She is a recipient of regional and national production grants for her work from such funding sources as NEA, the Jerome Foundation and The Leeway Foundation. Most recently she was awarded the 2003 and 2006 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for media arts.
RODNEY EVANS is the recipient of The Independent Feature Project’s Gordon Parks Award for Screenwriting for his screenplay, Brother To Brother. He also received funding from The Independent Television Service (ITVS), The Jerome Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and The National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) towards the writing and production of that project. Brother To Brother premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize in Drama. The film had its European premiere at The Berlin International Film Festival in February 2004 and was nominated for 4 Independent Spirit Awards including Best First Film and Best First Screenplay. It aired nationally on the PBS Series Independent Lens in June 2005. His autobiographical film, Close To Home, has been shown at over 30 film festivals throughout the world. His earlier feature-length project, The Unveiling, opened theatrically in Los Angeles and New York in 1998. He is currently developing his second narrative feature, Day Dream, starring Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) and Idris Elba (The Wire). The script is the first place winner of the 2008 Newfest Screenplay Competition. His new short film Billy and Aaron premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Evans was a Creative Capital Grantee and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2009.
RITA KOZEN is the FMA Office Manager. The Department Office is open from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.Room 120, Annenberg Hall, Main Campus
Phone: 215-204-4373
Fax: 215-20-5280
E-mail: kozen@temple.edu
MICHAEL KUETEMEYER is an active producer and teacher of experimental and documentary media. He is a founding member and current co-director of Termite TV Collective which recently completed the Living Documentary production/distribution tour across the USA. He received of a Fulbright Scholar Award in 1998 to teach media production at universities and media art centers in India. His new media works include the interactive video installation, Evolving Audience, which has been exhibited at the 2000 and 2001 Philadelphia Fringe Festivals as well as numerous universities and media art center across the country. Having an interest in exploring earth sciences through a blend of video and digital media, he produced an extensive interactive documentary about the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii. His documentary and experimental work includes Kamaka ‘eha (aching eye), a poetic document of the land of Hawai’i and the native Hawaiian struggle for sovereignty. Apart from creating his own work, he has taught non-linear editing, video production and multimedia at Temple University, University of the Arts, Dubai Television in the United Arab Emirates as part of the U.S. Specialist Exchange Program, as well as at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His video work has been screened at museums and festivals across the USA, including the Museum of Modern Art-NY, the Museum of Television and Radio, and the Dallas Video Festival. Explore Professor Kuetemeyer’s work at www.termite.org.
Professor DAVID PARRY is an award-winning filmmaker who has made influential documentary films in China, the Yukon Territory, and the Caribbean, and autobiographical avant-garde films in the U.S. His films have exhibited at leading international and national film festivals and broadcast on national PBS and European television. He has been awarded numerous grants including Artist-in-Residence grants, NEA independent filmmaker grants, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His films are in the permanent collection of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), where they are circulated to other institutions and exhibited in the MoMA film series. He was director of photography on John O’Brien’s super-16mm/35mm feature Nosey Parker, which showed at the South Southwest Film Festival and the Nantucket Film Festival. In the department of Film and Media Arts, Professor Parry specializes in direct cinema and cinema verite documentary movie-making, introductory filmmaking, advanced 16mm and super-16mm filmmaking. He also teaches courses in lighting in film and video and, along with the rest of his colleagues at Temple, explores the blending of fiction and non-fiction in small advanced classes. Professor Parry completed his graduate work at MIT in visual studies with pioneer direct cinema documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus; he also spent a year studying with MIT Artist-in-Residence and avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas; and studied with anthropological filmmaker and cinema verite founder Jean Rouch at Harvard University. Professor Parry taught film at Dartmouth College for ten years, and also worked in cross-discipline ethics research at Dartmouth’s Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics, where he was an executive board member.
Associate Professor ERAN PREIS received his BFA in theater from Tel Aviv University and his MFA in film from Ohio University. Before entering Academe, Mr. Preis worked for fifteen years as a playwright and screenwriter for Israeli television, theater and film. Five of his plays were produced professionally and received prestigious Israeli prizes such as the King David Award. Mr. Preis has had six screenplays produced for television and film including Beyond the Walls as co-author, which was nominated for the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film Category in 1984. Mr. Preis continued for several years writing for the Israeli theater and film industry and is now producing video documentaries in the United States. His feature-length documentary The Case of Jonathan Pollard received the New Filmmaker Award at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival and was selected for the Jewish Festivals of Toronto, Vancouver and Philadelphia, the Dallas Video Festival, the Fort Lauderdale International Film & Video Festival and the George Lindsey UNA Film Festival. His documentaries Cheerleaders and Bet Herut: the End of the Beginning (which is currently in distribution with the Cinema Guild) have won awards and been shown in national festivals. P. Baltimore, a documentary on a homeless woman, is being screened at conferences throughout the country. Professor Preis teaches Scriptwriting for Short and Feature Film, Senior Projects, and International Cinema.
MARK ROSENTHAL teaches advanced screenwriting and scene analysis. His feature film credits include: Mona Lisa Smile (Sony), Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (Fox), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Disney), Star Trek VI (Paramount), The Jewel of the Nile (Fox), Superman IV (Warners), The Beverly Hillbillies (Fox), Mercury Rising (Universal), Desperate Hours (MGM), Flicka (Fox), The Legend of Billie Jean (MGM) and Mighty Joe Young (Disney). He is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Writers Guild of America.
Associate Professor JEFF RUSH has served as department chair in Film & Media Arts, director of the MFA program, and Senior Associate Dean of the School of Communications and Theater. He received an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing from the American Film Institute and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Jeff Rush has worked as a freelance screenwriter and has published numerous articles. With Ken Dancyger, he wrote what has become one of the major texts in the field of screenwriting, Alternative Scriptwriting: Writing Beyond the Rules, now in its fourth edition. Professor Rush teaches a number of courses in directing and writing for media, including master classes in feature length screenwriting and a pioneering course in interactive narrative. Professor Rush received the 2007 Lindback Award for excellence in teaching.
Professor MICHAEL RYAN specializes in American Film and Cultural Studies. His books include An Introduction to Film Analysis, Marxism and Deconstruction, Poltiics and Culture, Camera Politica, and Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction. His doctorate is in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa.
Assistant Professor ELISABETH SUBRIN teaches advanced screenwriting, film/video production, video art, and film/video studies courses. She received an MFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. Over the past dozen years she has taught at Amherst, Bennington, Cooper Union, Harvard University, and Yale University School of Art’s Graduate Program. Her films and videos have received major awards at international festivals and have been exhibited extensively in museums, galleries and film festivals throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, The Vienna Viennale, The Walker Art Museum, and in national broadcasts on the Sundance Channel and public television. Subrin is both a Guggenheim Fellow and Rockefeller Fellow in Media Arts, and a Sundance Fellow in their Feature Film and Screenwriting Labs. Her 2006 film The Caretakers was a commission for The MacDowell Colony’s Centennial in 2007 and premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival. Her feature narrative Up is in development with Forensic Films. She just completed an HD video installation, Sweet Ruin, a commission from The Danish Arts Council and PARTICIPANT, Inc. in New York.
Professor PAUL SWANN writes about visual culture from a critical and historical perspective. His research interests include the international culture trade and media and the city. His most recent published work addresses the culture industries and the post-industrial city. His articles have appeared in numerous journals and scholarly anthologies including Studies in Visual Communication; Critical Communication Review; Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Media Development; Velvet Light Trap; and Cinema Journal. His most recent work is “From Workshop to Backlot: The Greater Philadelphia Film Office” published in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in Urban Context (2001). Dr. Swann’s books include The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 and The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain. Dr. Swann has reviewed manuscripts for University of Minnesota Press, Cambridge University Press, Temple University Press, Vanderbilt University Press, and Focal Press. He has consulted for the National Endowment on the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. His television credits include film research for Once in a Million Years (BBC-TV documentary) and Private Schultz (BBC-TV drama series). Film & Media courses taught by Dr. Swann include: Introduction to Film and Video Analysis; Media & Culture; History of Narrative Film; Critical History of Documentary Film; Film Theory and Aesthetics; Critical and Interpretive Methods; Communication Aesthetics; Film History; and Postmodern Criticism. Dr. Swann also offers courses in the American Studies and Intellectual Heritage programs, and has taught at Temple’s Campuses in Tokyo and London.
Associate Professor REA TAJIRI has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and twenty-five years of professional experience in documentary, feature length fiction, and experimental production. She is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Media and recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and numerous other fellowships. Her media work has received top awards at international festivals in both documentary and dramatic film, and has been exhibited extensively throughout the world including the Venice Film Festival, San Francisco International, Fukuoka International (where she received the Grand Prize), International Documentary Association (IDA), Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Biennial, and PBS. Her production History and Memory is regularly taught in courses on Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, Film Studies and History as a germinal work that offers a critique of cinema’s role in constructing popular history and cultural identity. Her work is distributed by Women Make Movies, Video Data Bank, NAATA, EAI, and is available through Netflix.
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Faculty & Staff
Adjunct Faculty Page: Click Here
Allan Barber
Warren Bass
Chris Cagle
Franklin Cason Jr.
Roderick Coover
Peter d’Agostino
LeAnn Erickson
Rodney Evans
Rita Kozen
Michael Kuetemeyer
David Parry
Mark Rosenthal
Jeff Rush
Michael Ryan
Elisabeth Subrin
Paul Swann
Rea Tajiri
NORA M. ALTER received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana University Press), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (University of Michigan Press), Chris Marker (University of Illinois Press) and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (Berghahn Books). She has published over fifty essays on a broad range of topics including Film and Media Studies, German and European Studies Cultural and Visual studies and Contemporary Art. She has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005, she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. From 2008–10 she was elected President of the Coalition of Women in German. She currently serves on the editorial board of The German Quarterly. She is completing a new book on the international essay film and has begun research on a new study devoted to sound.
Her teaching and research have been focused on twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective.
Experimental videos: Folk Songs (2007); hours, minutes, seconds, frame (1999) and Essential Things (1997). Animation work: Fun Days with Jake (2002) and bees, a documentary (2001). Documentary work: Folk Songs (2007); Neighbor Ladies (2005) and From One Place to Another (1996).
Festival screenings include:
Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival (Toronto CN), Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany), Feminale International Women’s Film Festival (Cologne, Germany), Women in the Director’s Chair (Chicago) and L’immagine Leggera: International Competition of Videoart and Experimental Film (Palermo, Italy).
She is a recipient of regional and national production grants for her work from such funding sources as NEA, the Jerome Foundation and The Leeway Foundation. Most recently she was awarded the 2003 and 2006 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for media arts.
Learn more about Professor Erickson’s work and teaching at her website,
http://sites.temple.edu/leannerickson/
RITA KOZEN is the FMA Office Manager. The Department Office is open from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.Room 120, Annenberg Hall, Main Campus
Phone: 215-204-4373
Fax: 215-20-5280
E-mail: kozen@temple.edu
Professor MICHAEL RYAN specializes in American Film and Cultural Studies. His books include An Introduction to Film Analysis, Marxism and Deconstruction, Poltiics and Culture, Camera Politica, and Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction. His doctorate is in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa.