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) and 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 more than 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 to 2010 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 cultural and visual studies of the twentieth century and twenty-first century from a comparative perspective. Learn more about Professor Alter’s publications at her web site.
Assistant Professor ALLAN BARBER is a graduate of Temple’s MFA program in film and television. He is the co-director of the School of Communication and Theater Los Angeles Internship Program, which places approximately 100 students in internships in the film and television industry each year. At Temple’s main campus, he teaches foundation courses in Media Arts aesthetics and production and mid-level and advanced courses in screenwriting, film history and criticism. Professor Barber has served as the director of the MFA program, faculty director of SCT’s London Program, director of the Film and Media Arts Honors Program, and a faculty advisor for the Temple University Student Film and Video Association. He is an active member of the University Film and Video Association. He was previously a member of the board of directors of UFVA and has served as Scriptwriting Editor for its publication, the Journal of Film and Video.
WARREN BASS is an independent filmmaker and professor in Temple’s Film and Media Arts department. He teaches directing, cinematography and advanced documentary and fiction film workshops. Professor Bass graduated from the Yale School of Drama with Honors in directing and from Columbia University in film and documentary, where he was a School of the Arts Scholar. He has taught at Yale University, New York University, California State University, and the American Film Institute and has chaired the Film and Media Arts department at Temple University as well as serving for extended periods of time as director of the MFA program in Film and Media Arts. He has served as Vice President of the University Film and Video Association and as guest editor of its Journal of Film and Video. In addition to directing live theater off-Broadway and in regional professional theater, he has directed productions on some of the country’s best professional stages, including Lincoln Center in New York and Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, where he helmed the world premiere of the musical drama Copernicus. His film and video productions have aired on syndicated television and cable channels, including PBS, in the United States and in Europe, Asia and Australia. His work has received more than 120 regional, national and international awards, including the Platinum Award (First Place) at Worldfest Houston, First Place at Athens International Film Festival, First Place at FirstGlance Film Festival (Philadelphia/Los Angeles), First Place at Bare Bones International Film Festival (Muskogee, Oklahoma), First and Second Places at New Haven International Film Festival, and awards at the Canadian International Film Festival (Toronto), Rochester International Film Festival, the British Animation Awards in London, and the UFVA Award of Merit. His films have been official selections at numerous international film festivals, including Oberhausen (Germany), Budapest (Hungary), Leipzig (Germany), Montreal (Canada), DeReel (Australia), Paris (France), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), St. John’s (Canada), and Uppsala (Sweden), in a total of 17 countries during the past 10 years. Professor Bass has received seven public television grants and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships for individual artists. He is a recipient of Temple University’s 2011 Award for Creative Achievement and a Temple University Great Teacher Award in 1999.
Recent Work:
Black Soldiers in Blue (2009, 33 minutes), a historical documentary on the recruitment of black volunteers during the American Civil War and their training at Camp William Penn. The film documents their hardships, their heroism and their contribution to Union victory. It was an official juried selection in six international film festivals with awards in three.
Monument Rubbings (5 minutes), an animation made from original hand-drawn graphics and rubbings from a Civil War monument.
Van Gogh’s Garden (2011, 4 minutes), an experimental animation based on Vincent van Gogh’s palette and his juxtaposition of colors.
CHRIS CAGLE is an assistant professor of film history and theory in the Film and Media Arts Department. 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 Award, granted by Screen journal for excellence in cinema studies. He has essays in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press), Media Convergence History (Routledge), American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (University of Georgia Press) and the forthcoming Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 2: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture (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 blog, Category D, showcases research in progress and discusses disciplinary issues in film and media studies.
Recent Work:
“Academic Blogging and Disciplinary Practice: Implications for Film and Media Studies.” In Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, Volume 2, edited by Scott Balcerzack and Jason Sperb. New York: Wallflower Press, 2012.
“Robert Redford and Warren Beatty: Consensus Stars for a Post-Consensus Age.” In Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s, edited by James Morrison, 39–60. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
“When Pierre Bourdieu Meets the Political Economists: RKO and the Leftists-in-Hollywood Problematic.” In Convergence Media History, edited by Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake, 24–33. London: Routledge, 2009.
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 adjunct faculty at Hunter College from 2007 to 2009 and at Queen’s College from 2009 to 2010. 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. His essay “Symbiopsychotaxiplasticity: Some Takes on William Greaves,” co-authored with Tsitis Jaji, is forthcoming in Theorizing Production/Producing Theory (Routledge). 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 and encourage a different set of discussions.
Recent Work:
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasticity: Some Takes on William Greaves,” co-authored with Tsitis Jaji. In Theorizing Production/Producing Theory, edited by John Jackson. London: Routledge, 2012.
Associate Professor RODERICK COOVER holds a BA from Cornell University (1989), an MA from Brown University (1994) and a PhD in the history of culture, with a specialization in media arts and anthropology, from the University of Chicago (1999). His films and new-media works include Unknown Territories (2011), Vérité to Virtual (DER, 2008), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank, 2007), and Cultures in Webs (Eastgate, 2003), among others. His scholarship has been published in journals such as Film Quarterly,Visual Studies, and Visual Anthropology and in books such as the SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. As co-editor of the recently published Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (University of Chicago Press), Professor Coover examines the impact of new technologies in the humanities and arts. He has presented plenary and keynote addresses at conferences in North America, South America and Europe, and his visual works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as Documenta Madrid and SIGGRAPH. Professor Coover is on executive and editorial boards with the International Visual Sociology Association, the Electronic Literature Organization, Visual Studies and E-Media, and his awards include a United States Information Agency Fulbright-Hays 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 international cinema, interactive media arts, anthropological film, documentary arts, visual research and experimental methods from film to digital media. His courses, which combine critique, screenings, group and individual project work, and readings from across the disciplines, challenge students to test issues of film and media theory through original and innovative productions. Discover more about Professor Coover at his web site.
Recent Work:
The publication of a large interactive work in the nation’s leading collection of multimedia literature. “Voyage into the Unknown.” In Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, edited by Laura Borràs et al. College Park, M.D.: Electronic Literature Organization, 2010.
Exhibition of the works Currency (Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, Penna., in November 2011), Something That Happened Only Once, Outside/Inside, Unknown Territories, Rats and Cats, and The Last Volcano, among others.
The publication of a co-edited book with University of Chicago Press: Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology In The Humanities And Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
In 2010, he received an award as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Bergen, Norway.
PETER D’AGOSTINO is a professor of film and media arts and director of the NewTechLab at Temple University, where he teaches 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 (“The American Century—Film and Video in America 1950-2000” and the Whitney Biennial), the Bienal de Sao Paulo (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. Professor d’Agostino is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Brazil, 1996; Australia, 2003). He has 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 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an artist-in-residence at the TV Laboratory at WNET in New York City, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, as well as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. 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, respectively, at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. D’Agostino’s books include Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture (SAGE Publications), The Un/Necessary Image (Tanam Press)and TeleGuide—A Proposal for QUBE (NFS Press). He is also a contributor to Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (Aperture), and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (University of California Press). Recent publications featuring his work include Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press). Read more about Professor d’Agostino on his web site.
Recent Work:
TeleTapes, Remote Control exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, April through June 2012.
Mixed Messages: Marshall McLuhan and the Moving Image, Panel and screenings, Penn Humanities Forum at the International House, Philadelphia, March 31, 2012.
Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-81 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 2011 through February 2012.
Peter d’Agostino: 1970s – 2010s (Selected Works) at Braunstein / Quay Gallery, San Francisco, July through August 2011.
World Wide Walks in Bilbao, Spain; Berkeley, California; San Francisco, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Letterkenny, Ireland.
SARAH DRURY is an associate professor in the Film and Media Arts department. She received a BA from Barnard College and graduate degrees from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and from the Art & Media/Photography program of the International Center of Photography and NYU. Drury is a media artist working with video and sound across a range of installation, performance and network platforms. Her work with sensing technologies and media focuses on narrative, play and the emergent subject in diverse contexts, including gallery installation, performance art and theatrical forms, such as opera. Her recent work Mechanics of Place, designed in collaboration with Hana Iverson, is an “augmented reality” platform for user-generated virtual public artworks situated in various cities in which audience members use the camera view on their smartphones to participate. Her media design for Violet Fire, a multimedia opera about Nikola Tesla, includes interactive projections responding to the voices of singers and the movements of dancers, and was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2006. She conceived and directed the performance work The Walking Project, which was made in collaboration with Cathy Weis, Shelley Barry, Lezlie Frye, Seth Erickson and Carol Marfisi and involved the creation of three sensor-based performances “speaking” the body with dis/abilities. Installations include The Listening Microphone, Voicebox, Vocalalia and Intervention Chants, which explore the expressive qualities of the voice in interaction with video and sound. Grants awarded to Professor Drury include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her work has been presented in national and international venues, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival, ISEA International, Association of Computing Media Multimedia Conference, Performative Sites, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kitchen, Artists Space, Hallwalls, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and the Worldwide Video Festival at The Hague. Her work has also aired on PBS. Professor 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 web site.
LEANN ERICKSON is an associate professor of film and video production in the Film and Media Arts department and has been an independent video- and filmmaker for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared on public and cable television and in media and art galleries, and has won national and international recognition in video and film festivals. Titles include Experimental Videos: Folk Songs (2007), hours, minutes, seconds, frame (1999) and Essential Things (1997). Animation works include Fun Days with Jake (2002) and bees, a documentary (2001). Documentary work includes Folk Songs (2007), Neighbor Ladies (2005) and From One Place to Another (1996). Professor Erickson’s work has been screened at Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), 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: Palermo International Videoart, Film, and Media Festival (Italy). She is a recipient of regional and national production grants for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, 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 web site.
Recent Work:
Awarded a Temple University Summer Fellowship (2012) for the development of “The Computer Wore Heels,” a non-fiction book to accompany the documentary Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII (2010).
Since September 2010, Professor Erickson has been on a national tour with her documentary Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII (2010). The film has screened at more than 20 venues nationwide, is being distributed by PBS and is streaming at Netflix.com.
Visiting Assistant Professor 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, the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Black Programming Consortium toward 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 four Film Independent Spirit awards, including Best First Film and Best First Screenplay. It aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens in June 2005. His second feature-length screenplay, Day Dream, was the first-place winner of the screenplay competition at NewFest in 2008. His recent short film, Billy and Aaron, premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Professor Evans was a Creative Capital grantee and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2008-2009. He is currently in post-production on his second narrative feature, The Happy Sad.
Recent Work:
Professor Evans recently received post-production funds from the New York State Council on the Arts for The Happy Sad.
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
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Phone: 215-204-4373
Fax: 215-20-5280
E-mail: kozen@temple.edu
Associate professor 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. The collective currently is celebrating its twentieth year of innovative media production at www.termite.org and is profiled in the 2012 National Alliance of Media Arts & Culture whitepaper report on the field. Professor Kuetemeyer’s video work has screened at museums and festivals nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Television and Radio, and the Dallas Video Festival. Having an interest in exploring earth sciences through digital media, he is producing interactive documentary iOS apps about the Kilauea Volcano, Kilauea Iki and Plants. His documentary and experimental work includes Kamaka ‘eha (aching eye), a poetic documentary about the land of Hawai’i and the native Hawaiian struggle for sovereignty. Other locative media projects Kuetemeyer has produced are profiled at Termite TV’s Walk Philly site. His new-media works include the interactive video installation Evolving Audience, which was exhibited at the 2000 and 2001 Philadelphia Fringe festivals as well as at numerous universities and media art centers across the country. At Temple, Professor Kuetemeyer teaches courses in videography, moving camera, interactive media, editing and experimental television production. He received a Fulbright Scholar Award in 1998 to teach media production at universities and media art centers in India. He has also taught at the University of the Arts and Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia and at Dubai Television in the United Arab Emirates as part of the U.S. Specialist Exchange Program. He received his MFA in radio, television, and film from Temple University and majored in communication arts and meteorology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Professor DAVID PARRY is an award-winning filmmaker who has made influential documentary films in China, the Yukon Territory, the Caribbean, and autobiographical avant-garde films in the United States. His films have exhibited at leading international and national film festivals and broadcast on national prime-time PBS and European television. He has been awarded numerous grants including artist-in-residence grants, National Endowment for the Arts independent filmmaker grants, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where they are circulated to other institutions and exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art film series. He was director of photography on John O’Brien’s award-winning Super-16mm/35mm doc-fiction feature Nosey Parker, which showed at the South by Southwest Film Festival and the Nantucket Film Festival. In the department of Film and Media Arts, Professor Parry specializes in direct cinema and cinéma vérité documentary, introductory and advanced 16mm and Super-16mm filmmaking; he also teaches courses in lighting for film, video and photography. Professor Parry completed his graduate work at MIT in visual studies with pioneer direct cinema/cinéma vérité filmmakers Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. He also studied with MIT artist-in-residence and avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and with anthropological filmmaker and cinéma vérité founder Jean Rouch at Harvard University. Professor Parry taught film at Dartmouth College for 10 years, and also worked in cross-disciplinary ethics research at Dartmouth’s Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics, where he was an executive board member. He also held a joint research appointment as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine at Dartmouth College. Recently, Professor Parry was the faculty director of the FMA Los Angeles Study Away Program, where he helped to expand it from a summer program to a year-long program. He is currently filming and editing two personal documentaries, as well as lecturing and writing about personal cinema.
Recent Work:
Professor Parry is editing a documentary about his great-great-grandfather, Francisco Oller (1833–1917), a Puerto Rican realist-impressionist painter who lived and painted with Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro off and on during a 20-year period.
He is filming a personal documentary portrait about a public elementary school coping with corporate educational infringement.
Associate professor ERAN PREIS received his BFA in theater from Tel Aviv University and his MFA in film from Ohio University. Before entering academia, Professor Preis worked for 15 years as a playwright and screenwriter for Israeli television, theater and film. Five of his plays were produced professionally and received prestigious Israeli prizes, including the King David Award. He has had six screenplays produced for television and film, including Beyond the Walls (as co-author), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1984. Professor Preis now produces 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 also screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, 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 through the Cinema Guild) have won awards and have been shown in national festivals. P. Baltimore, a documentary about a homeless woman, is being screened at conferences throughout the country. Professor Preis teaches courses in scriptwriting and international cinema, as well Senior Projects.
Recent Work:
Jonathan’s Return (2011) was introduced and discussed on the PBS national program “Voices in the Family.” The program included interviews with Professor Pres and his wife, Andrea Preis.
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 (Warner Bros.), 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 and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America.
Associate professor JEFF RUSH has served as department chair in Film and 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 Iowa Writers’ Workshop at Iowa University. Professor 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. He 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.
Recent Work:
Published “Five Scene Structure: A Writer’s Analysis of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore” in Script & Pitch Insights, which is sponsored by the Media Committee of the European Union.
Presented lectures on Scene and Structure in Alba, Italy.
Presented “Avatars Sharing Agency: Metaphor in Interactive Narrative Environments” at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver, Washington.
Professor MICHAEL RYAN specializes in American film and cultural studies. His books include An Introduction to Criticism: Literature, Film, Culture (Wiley-Blackwell), Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (The Johns Hopkins University Press), Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society (The Johns Hopkins University Press), Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Indiana University Press) and Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell). His earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.
ELISABETH SUBRIN is an assistant professor and teaches Senior Projects, Advanced Problems, and courses on women film and video artists, screenwriting, video art, as well as graduate seminars on narrative and experimental film and video practices. 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. Prior to teaching at Temple, she taught at Amherst College, Cooper Union, Harvard University, Bennington College and the Yale University School of Art MFA Program and was Distinguished Visiting Graduate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. 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 Viennale, the Walker Art Museum, the New York Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her work has been presented in national broadcasts on the Sundance Channel and on public television. Professor Subrin is both a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow in Media Arts, and a Sundance Fellow in their Feature Film and Screenwriting Labs. She has also received grants from the Annenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, and the Andrea Frank Foundation. Her 2006 narrative short, The Caretakers, was commissioned by the MacDowell Colony for their Centennial and premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival. Recent video installations and photographic works have been presented in solo exhibitions at VOLTA NY 2011 and the Jewish Museum, and in group exhibitions at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, La Musee D’Art Contemporain/Val De Marne in Paris, the “Greater New York” show at the Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1, and in a retrospective at Sue Scott Gallery in New York. Her feature-length narrative film is in development with Forensic Films 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, Cinema Journal, Critical Communication Review, Historical Media Development, Velvet Light Trap and Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 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). Professor Swann’s books include The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 and The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain. He 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 and Media Arts courses taught by Professor 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. Professor Swann also offers courses in the American Studies and Intellectual Heritage programs and has taught at Temple University’s campuses in Tokyo and London.
Associate professor REA TAJIRI has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and 25 years of professional experience in documentary, feature-length fiction and experimental production. She is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Media and a recipient of numerous fellowships, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her media work has received top awards at international festivals in both documentary and dramatic film and has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. Festivals and museums that have screened her work include the Venice Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Fukuoka International Film Festival (where she received the Grand Prize), International Documentary Association (IDA), the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Biennial. Her work has been broadcast nationally on 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, National Asian American Telecommunications Association and Electronic Arts Intermix, and is available through Netflix.com.
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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) and 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 more than 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 to 2010 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 cultural and visual studies of the twentieth century and twenty-first century from a comparative perspective. Learn more about Professor Alter’s publications at her web site.
Assistant Professor ALLAN BARBER is a graduate of Temple’s MFA program in film and television. He is the co-director of the School of Communication and Theater Los Angeles Internship Program, which places approximately 100 students in internships in the film and television industry each year. At Temple’s main campus, he teaches foundation courses in Media Arts aesthetics and production and mid-level and advanced courses in screenwriting, film history and criticism. Professor Barber has served as the director of the MFA program, faculty director of SCT’s London Program, director of the Film and Media Arts Honors Program, and a faculty advisor for the Temple University Student Film and Video Association. He is an active member of the University Film and Video Association. He was previously a member of the board of directors of UFVA and has served as Scriptwriting Editor for its publication, the Journal of Film and Video.
WARREN BASS is an independent filmmaker and professor in Temple’s Film and Media Arts department. He teaches directing, cinematography and advanced documentary and fiction film workshops. Professor Bass graduated from the Yale School of Drama with Honors in directing and from Columbia University in film and documentary, where he was a School of the Arts Scholar. He has taught at Yale University, New York University, California State University, and the American Film Institute and has chaired the Film and Media Arts department at Temple University as well as serving for extended periods of time as director of the MFA program in Film and Media Arts. He has served as Vice President of the University Film and Video Association and as guest editor of its Journal of Film and Video. In addition to directing live theater off-Broadway and in regional professional theater, he has directed productions on some of the country’s best professional stages, including Lincoln Center in New York and Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, where he helmed the world premiere of the musical drama Copernicus. His film and video productions have aired on syndicated television and cable channels, including PBS, in the United States and in Europe, Asia and Australia. His work has received more than 120 regional, national and international awards, including the Platinum Award (First Place) at Worldfest Houston, First Place at Athens International Film Festival, First Place at FirstGlance Film Festival (Philadelphia/Los Angeles), First Place at Bare Bones International Film Festival (Muskogee, Oklahoma), First and Second Places at New Haven International Film Festival, and awards at the Canadian International Film Festival (Toronto), Rochester International Film Festival, the British Animation Awards in London, and the UFVA Award of Merit. His films have been official selections at numerous international film festivals, including Oberhausen (Germany), Budapest (Hungary), Leipzig (Germany), Montreal (Canada), DeReel (Australia), Paris (France), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), St. John’s (Canada), and Uppsala (Sweden), in a total of 17 countries during the past 10 years. Professor Bass has received seven public television grants and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships for individual artists. He is a recipient of Temple University’s 2011 Award for Creative Achievement and a Temple University Great Teacher Award in 1999.
Recent Work:
CHRIS CAGLE is an assistant professor of film history and theory in the Film and Media Arts Department. 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 Award, granted by Screen journal for excellence in cinema studies. He has essays in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press), Media Convergence History (Routledge), American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (University of Georgia Press) and the forthcoming Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 2: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture (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 blog, Category D, showcases research in progress and discusses disciplinary issues in film and media studies.
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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 adjunct faculty at Hunter College from 2007 to 2009 and at Queen’s College from 2009 to 2010. 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. His essay “Symbiopsychotaxiplasticity: Some Takes on William Greaves,” co-authored with Tsitis Jaji, is forthcoming in Theorizing Production/Producing Theory (Routledge). 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 and encourage a different set of discussions.
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Associate Professor RODERICK COOVER holds a BA from Cornell University (1989), an MA from Brown University (1994) and a PhD in the history of culture, with a specialization in media arts and anthropology, from the University of Chicago (1999). His films and new-media works include Unknown Territories (2011), Vérité to Virtual (DER, 2008), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank, 2007), and Cultures in Webs (Eastgate, 2003), among others. His scholarship has been published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, and Visual Anthropology and in books such as the SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. As co-editor of the recently published Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (University of Chicago Press), Professor Coover examines the impact of new technologies in the humanities and arts. He has presented plenary and keynote addresses at conferences in North America, South America and Europe, and his visual works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as Documenta Madrid and SIGGRAPH. Professor Coover is on executive and editorial boards with the International Visual Sociology Association, the Electronic Literature Organization, Visual Studies and E-Media, and his awards include a United States Information Agency Fulbright-Hays 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 international cinema, interactive media arts, anthropological film, documentary arts, visual research and experimental methods from film to digital media. His courses, which combine critique, screenings, group and individual project work, and readings from across the disciplines, challenge students to test issues of film and media theory through original and innovative productions. Discover more about Professor Coover at his web site.
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PETER D’AGOSTINO is a professor of film and media arts and director of the NewTechLab at Temple University, where he teaches 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 (“The American Century—Film and Video in America 1950-2000” and the Whitney Biennial), the Bienal de Sao Paulo (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. Professor d’Agostino is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Brazil, 1996; Australia, 2003). He has 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 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an artist-in-residence at the TV Laboratory at WNET in New York City, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, as well as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. 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, respectively, at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. D’Agostino’s books include Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture (SAGE Publications), The Un/Necessary Image (Tanam Press) and TeleGuide—A Proposal for QUBE (NFS Press). He is also a contributor to Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (Aperture), and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (University of California Press). Recent publications featuring his work include Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press). Read more about Professor d’Agostino on his web site.
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SARAH DRURY is an associate professor in the Film and Media Arts department. She received a BA from Barnard College and graduate degrees from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and from the Art & Media/Photography program of the International Center of Photography and NYU. Drury is a media artist working with video and sound across a range of installation, performance and network platforms. Her work with sensing technologies and media focuses on narrative, play and the emergent subject in diverse contexts, including gallery installation, performance art and theatrical forms, such as opera. Her recent work Mechanics of Place, designed in collaboration with Hana Iverson, is an “augmented reality” platform for user-generated virtual public artworks situated in various cities in which audience members use the camera view on their smartphones to participate. Her media design for Violet Fire, a multimedia opera about Nikola Tesla, includes interactive projections responding to the voices of singers and the movements of dancers, and was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2006. She conceived and directed the performance work The Walking Project, which was made in collaboration with Cathy Weis, Shelley Barry, Lezlie Frye, Seth Erickson and Carol Marfisi and involved the creation of three sensor-based performances “speaking” the body with dis/abilities. Installations include The Listening Microphone, Voicebox, Vocalalia and Intervention Chants, which explore the expressive qualities of the voice in interaction with video and sound. Grants awarded to Professor Drury include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her work has been presented in national and international venues, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival, ISEA International, Association of Computing Media Multimedia Conference, Performative Sites, the Brooklyn Museum, the Kitchen, Artists Space, Hallwalls, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and the Worldwide Video Festival at The Hague. Her work has also aired on PBS. Professor 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 web site.
LEANN ERICKSON is an associate professor of film and video production in the Film and Media Arts department and has been an independent video- and filmmaker for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared on public and cable television and in media and art galleries, and has won national and international recognition in video and film festivals. Titles include Experimental Videos: Folk Songs (2007), hours, minutes, seconds, frame (1999) and Essential Things (1997). Animation works include Fun Days with Jake (2002) and bees, a documentary (2001). Documentary work includes Folk Songs (2007), Neighbor Ladies (2005) and From One Place to Another (1996). Professor Erickson’s work has been screened at Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), 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: Palermo International Videoart, Film, and Media Festival (Italy). She is a recipient of regional and national production grants for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, 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 web site.
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Visiting Assistant Professor 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, the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Black Programming Consortium toward 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 four Film Independent Spirit awards, including Best First Film and Best First Screenplay. It aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens in June 2005. His second feature-length screenplay, Day Dream, was the first-place winner of the screenplay competition at NewFest in 2008. His recent short film, Billy and Aaron, premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Professor Evans was a Creative Capital grantee and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2008-2009. He is currently in post-production on his second narrative feature, The Happy Sad.
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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
Associate professor 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. The collective currently is celebrating its twentieth year of innovative media production at www.termite.org and is profiled in the 2012 National Alliance of Media Arts & Culture whitepaper report on the field. Professor Kuetemeyer’s video work has screened at museums and festivals nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Television and Radio, and the Dallas Video Festival. Having an interest in exploring earth sciences through digital media, he is producing interactive documentary iOS apps about the Kilauea Volcano, Kilauea Iki and Plants. His documentary and experimental work includes Kamaka ‘eha (aching eye), a poetic documentary about the land of Hawai’i and the native Hawaiian struggle for sovereignty. Other locative media projects Kuetemeyer has produced are profiled at Termite TV’s Walk Philly site. His new-media works include the interactive video installation Evolving Audience, which was exhibited at the 2000 and 2001 Philadelphia Fringe festivals as well as at numerous universities and media art centers across the country. At Temple, Professor Kuetemeyer teaches courses in videography, moving camera, interactive media, editing and experimental television production. He received a Fulbright Scholar Award in 1998 to teach media production at universities and media art centers in India. He has also taught at the University of the Arts and Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia and at Dubai Television in the United Arab Emirates as part of the U.S. Specialist Exchange Program. He received his MFA in radio, television, and film from Temple University and majored in communication arts and meteorology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Professor DAVID PARRY is an award-winning filmmaker who has made influential documentary films in China, the Yukon Territory, the Caribbean, and autobiographical avant-garde films in the United States. His films have exhibited at leading international and national film festivals and broadcast on national prime-time PBS and European television. He has been awarded numerous grants including artist-in-residence grants, National Endowment for the Arts independent filmmaker grants, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where they are circulated to other institutions and exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art film series. He was director of photography on John O’Brien’s award-winning Super-16mm/35mm doc-fiction feature Nosey Parker, which showed at the South by Southwest Film Festival and the Nantucket Film Festival. In the department of Film and Media Arts, Professor Parry specializes in direct cinema and cinéma vérité documentary, introductory and advanced 16mm and Super-16mm filmmaking; he also teaches courses in lighting for film, video and photography. Professor Parry completed his graduate work at MIT in visual studies with pioneer direct cinema/cinéma vérité filmmakers Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. He also studied with MIT artist-in-residence and avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and with anthropological filmmaker and cinéma vérité founder Jean Rouch at Harvard University. Professor Parry taught film at Dartmouth College for 10 years, and also worked in cross-disciplinary ethics research at Dartmouth’s Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics, where he was an executive board member. He also held a joint research appointment as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine at Dartmouth College. Recently, Professor Parry was the faculty director of the FMA Los Angeles Study Away Program, where he helped to expand it from a summer program to a year-long program. He is currently filming and editing two personal documentaries, as well as lecturing and writing about personal cinema.
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Associate professor ERAN PREIS received his BFA in theater from Tel Aviv University and his MFA in film from Ohio University. Before entering academia, Professor Preis worked for 15 years as a playwright and screenwriter for Israeli television, theater and film. Five of his plays were produced professionally and received prestigious Israeli prizes, including the King David Award. He has had six screenplays produced for television and film, including Beyond the Walls (as co-author), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1984. Professor Preis now produces 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 also screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, 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 through the Cinema Guild) have won awards and have been shown in national festivals. P. Baltimore, a documentary about a homeless woman, is being screened at conferences throughout the country. Professor Preis teaches courses in scriptwriting and international cinema, as well Senior Projects.
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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 (Warner Bros.), 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 and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America.
Associate professor JEFF RUSH has served as department chair in Film and 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 Iowa Writers’ Workshop at Iowa University. Professor 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. He 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.
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Professor MICHAEL RYAN specializes in American film and cultural studies. His books include An Introduction to Criticism: Literature, Film, Culture (Wiley-Blackwell), Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (The Johns Hopkins University Press), Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society (The Johns Hopkins University Press), Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Indiana University Press) and Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell). His earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.
ELISABETH SUBRIN is an assistant professor and teaches Senior Projects, Advanced Problems, and courses on women film and video artists, screenwriting, video art, as well as graduate seminars on narrative and experimental film and video practices. 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. Prior to teaching at Temple, she taught at Amherst College, Cooper Union, Harvard University, Bennington College and the Yale University School of Art MFA Program and was Distinguished Visiting Graduate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. 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 Viennale, the Walker Art Museum, the New York Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her work has been presented in national broadcasts on the Sundance Channel and on public television. Professor Subrin is both a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow in Media Arts, and a Sundance Fellow in their Feature Film and Screenwriting Labs. She has also received grants from the Annenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, and the Andrea Frank Foundation. Her 2006 narrative short, The Caretakers, was commissioned by the MacDowell Colony for their Centennial and premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival. Recent video installations and photographic works have been presented in solo exhibitions at VOLTA NY 2011 and the Jewish Museum, and in group exhibitions at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, La Musee D’Art Contemporain/Val De Marne in Paris, the “Greater New York” show at the Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1, and in a retrospective at Sue Scott Gallery in New York. Her feature-length narrative film is in development with Forensic Films 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, Cinema Journal, Critical Communication Review, Historical Media Development, Velvet Light Trap and Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 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). Professor Swann’s books include The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 and The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain. He 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 and Media Arts courses taught by Professor 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. Professor Swann also offers courses in the American Studies and Intellectual Heritage programs and has taught at Temple University’s campuses in Tokyo and London.
Associate professor REA TAJIRI has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and 25 years of professional experience in documentary, feature-length fiction and experimental production. She is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Media and a recipient of numerous fellowships, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her media work has received top awards at international festivals in both documentary and dramatic film and has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. Festivals and museums that have screened her work include the Venice Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Fukuoka International Film Festival (where she received the Grand Prize), International Documentary Association (IDA), the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Biennial. Her work has been broadcast nationally on 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, National Asian American Telecommunications Association and Electronic Arts Intermix, and is available through Netflix.com.