First YearsKarl Blumenthal |
Second YearsJason Coyle |
Third YearsLouise Akanlu |
Fourth YearsSara Zia Ebrahimi |
Fifth Years |
Louise AKANLU is from Ghana. She is in Temple as a Fellow of the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Programme. Prior to enrolling in the MFA programme in the FMA Department of Temple University, Louise worked as a freelance video Producer/Director and a Theatre for Development Facilitator in her home country. She has produced and directed several television documentaries, educational videos and television magazine programmes. She has also worked extensively with rural and grassroots communities in the application of Popular Theatre for research and community animation. Louise’s interest in film is in its application as a tool for advocating the right and needs of people who live on the fringes of the world.
Karl-Rainer Blumenthal is an MFA candidate studying Film & Media Arts at Temple University. In 2006, he completed his undergraduate thesis, “Of Gods and Grizzlies: The Non-Aesthetic of Nature and the New Kinship of Werner Herzog and Caspar David Friedrich,” and earned his bachelors degree in History of Art from Haverford College. Through his interdisciplinary studies among the Departments of History of Art, English and German & German Studies at Bryn Mawr College, Karl also achieved a minor in Film Studies. He has since begun making short films and experimenting with issues of history, historiography and narratization across media. His most recent products include the experimental documentary “Life in Centralia,” and music videos directed for the techno musician Pink Munky and college rock band Sex Piano. Karl’s goal for the future is to continue making, studying, and teaching Film in Philadelphia.
W. Scott Calvert, a Texas native, received his undergraduate degree in Neuroscience. After a brief career in Student Affairs, Scott is currently a 3rd Year MFA candidate in the Film and Media Arts Program. He is primarily interested in making narrative films and hopes to incorporate ideas from Calvinism, comic books, caricature, and Texas.
Carla LynDale Carter comes to Temple from Cleveland, Ohio. She received a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago studying Cinema & Media Arts. She's interested in ways that video and media can be used to reach youth as well as various communities. She has worked with Scribe Video Center as a video facilitator for their Precious Places Oral History Project. Over the years Carla has worked with various youth organizations teaching film and video. She wrote and produced the short film Black Butterflies which received a PIFVA subsidy grant as well as an MFA completion grant, and is currently in post-production.
Phally is an immigrant who came to America as a baby after the end of the Vietnam War. He attended Temple University as an undergraduate in the Film and Media Arts program. Loving the program, Phally applied to the MFA program to grow artistically as a filmmaker within the excellence of the professors who taught him. Considering himself as the “poor man’s knowledge book,” Phally has his own unique perspective. Bringing out a kind of specialty in the work he does, he readily rejects the wants and needs of a “typical film student,” and adapts more to being “humanistic” toward his study and work. Not ignorant of the importance of film studies, he pays respect to the formality of the discipline considering he is a just a normal guy studying film. More powerful without words, his approach to film is to present life in its nature. The love and support of the people in his life has given the strengthen to continue his own approach amidst resistance from the typical and sometimes tradition approach.
In June of 2005, Jason Coyle presented a paper/video performance entitled "Blank Pages, Canvases, and Screens," at the University of Amsterdam's Cinema in Europe: Networks in Progress Conference. His recent projects include a video essay on unlawful evictions of tenants from abandoned buildings and a series of video stories that develop conflicting accounts of origin and false genealogies for a fictional town.
Alison completed her BA in art at the University of Vermont and received her BFA in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Since moving to Philadelphia, she has co-created “Seeing Our Voices,” an independent, grassroots program dedicated to articulating the voices of inner city youth. Resulting from this work, “Mayor for a Day” is a collaborative effort between herself, kids of southwest Philadelphia, filmmaker Tracy Pereira, and spoken word artist Mee-Lin Youk. The film was honored with an award of distinction as part of the Great Expectations film contest. Her previous documentary “Farewell, Silk City” was a regional finalist for the Student Academy Awards. With the support of a Temple University completion grant, Alison will direct her thesis project this summer. The narrative short, “A Song of Fishes,” will be shot in Vermont.
Marc is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, and teacher in Philadelphia. He earned his BA in Cognitive Science and Filmmaking from Hampshire College. For the stage, he directed All the King’s Men, an original play by Glenn Kessler and Brian Savelson presented by Dixon Place and HERE Arts Center at the NYC FUSE Festival. Void Therapies, a collaboration with artist Kimberly Brandt, was presented at University Settlement and P.S. 122 in 2004. His short experimental film Tiny Umbrellas was commissioned by Spout Press to accompany the release of Jeffrey Little’s The Book of Arcana: Tomorrow’s Stone Age Cosmology Today, and premiered in Minneapolis, MN. He designed video projection for David O’Connor’s production of The Devils in Philadelphia.Scrapbook, a multimedia installation, was presented in a solo, two-month exhibition at the Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, in Buffalo, NY in 2007. Marc is currently at work on a short narrative of a young man dealing with the death of a childhood friend in Iraq. He is an Adjunct Instructor of Film at La Salle University and Temple University. He is completing his Master in Fine Arts degree in Film and Media Arts at Temple.
While growing up, Laura Deutch watched Philadelphia's boundaries morph and shift. She is now excited to rediscover both the established history and the emerging life of this oddly familiar city. Over the last six years she has involved herself with different facets of independent media and social justice work. After graduating with a BA in Media Studies from Ithaca College, she began working at the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley. Most recently, she worked with award winning filmmaker Rob Nilsson to produce and edit, Security, a bold and challenging feature-length work that looks at political and personal security in dangerous times. Over the last two years she has had the opportunity to work with a traveling film festival in Honduras, and a community development project in Peru. A two-time student Fellow at the Flaherty Film Seminar, her interests include media literacy, new technologies, participatory projects, community stories, and social histories.
An Iranian-American artist, activist, and cultural studies/media studies enthusiast, Sara Zia has been involved in community organizing, independent media production and distribution for nearly a decade with groups such as Free Radio Gainesville, Civic Media Center, Prometheus Radio Project, Paper Tiger TV, the Independent Media Center, Asian Arts Initiative and Scribe Video Center. She currently works as the development officer at Bread & Roses Community Fund, a local foundation that raises money from individuals to give away to groups working for racial and economic justice in the Philadelphia area. She is also the film programmer and a board member of the Black Lily Women's Film and Music Festival and serves as a review panelist for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Occasionally she remembers to make her own films as well. Her dream life would be to raise money and produce work by female filmmakers, offer a venue for them to be screened at, and then cook a tasty dinner for the entire production crew from fresh produce.
A native of Oakland, California, Julia Fuller received her B.A. in cognitive psychology and studied photography and theatrical lighting design at Barnard College in New York. After college, the city trapped her, and she worked on several theatrical productions and at music venues Southpaw and The Bowery Ballroom as lighting designer. The combination of physical labor, technical knowledge, and artistic interpretation of a script involved in lighting immensely appealed to her, and she wanted to apply it to film. She began with documentary video and community media at Downtown Community Television. There she worked on lighting and production for cable access television shows including Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! and operated the camera for Speak Up! New York, a PBS documentary on youth civic participation produced from a traveling TV studio-equipped bus. Back in California, she continued to pursue her interest in media literacy at Berkeley Community Media and gripped for student films. She also worked with Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman doing research for a History Channel documentary on the California Gold Rush. Julia appreciates film that effectively mixes fantasy and experimental elements with harsh reality and leaves the viewer nauseated from exposure to important social commentary. She is also interested in health issues, the safety of our food supply, and international queer communities.
Born in Charleston, West Virginia—Holdren earned a B.S. in
Communications and a B.A. in English: Professional Writing from WV State College (now University), and is currently in the final stretch of his M.F.A. Before arriving at Temple, Holdren worked in community theatre as a director, playwright, and show-running producer of a monthly short play series called Briefs & Shorts, where he worked to attract new directors and playwrights in the
region. Holdren also created multi-layered digital sound designs for several plays, running the gamut from simple atmospherics to extreme incorporation of sound within narrative and performance. In film and video, Holdren won awards for his short animation Blah, and for his collaboration on the 16mm fantasy Unexpected Aphrodisiacs.
While at Temple, Holdren's selected work includes: the award-
winning tragic comedy Audition (as director, co-writer, and
exec. producer) which has screened in multiple film festivals around the country; Play (as director, writer, producer), a comedy-of-manners which made its festival debut in November 2007; The Paradigm Shift (as screenwriter and producer) a timely drama which debuted in February 2008; Meat (as producer —a polarizing experimental short debuting in Boston March 2008; and Roy G. Biv (as Line Producer), a 35mm graduate drama from NYU currently in post-production.
For more information on Sam Holdren, please visit
www.samholdren.com.
Hannah Ireland received her B.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Upon graduating in 2001, she moved to New York City with a grant from the Hodson Trust to do a summer internship at The Doc Tank with filmmaker Immy Humes. In 2003, Hannah collaborated with artist Annie Vought to create Simple Pleasures, a documentary about the inhabitants of a café. Her recent work includes cinematography for Barrel Children by Cara Weir, assistant directing Cowboys and Indians at The Duke City Shootout with Patrick Mehaffy, and recording an audio piece about a mule-packing trip her parents took in the early seventies.
Bruce James grew up in a small tourist town on a lake in south central Missouri. He graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a B.A. in Communications and Film Studies, then lived in Philadelphia, Boston, and back in Philadelphia, working for several years as a grip and electrician for a variety of film and video productions. His film, Copernicus, won best short film at the United States Super 8 Film and Digital Video Festival. Bruce is currently looking into non-didactic ways to explore environmental issues in documentary film. His recent projects include a documentary about the American shad in the Delaware River and a narrative short about a desperate attempt to increase food production through the power of mathematics.
After growing up in New Hampshire and Vermont Ben moved to the big city of Poughkeepsie, New York, for college where he graduated from Vassar with a degree in American Culture and Film Production in 1998. After school, he spent four years working at Children’s Media Project, a community-based media literacy and media production organization, before transitioning back into filmmaking full time and hopefully for good. His first feature-length film, Leaps of Faith, co-directed by Andrew Davison and produced in 2004, was an observational documentary tracking the perspectives of ordinary passers-by on the streets in and around Poughkeepsie during the first year of war in Iraq. Since the spring of 2003 he’s been shooting, interviewing, researching and writing grants as the associate producer alongside director Barbara Ettinger on her new documentary Two Square Miles. Currently he’s living in Philly where he started the MFA program in the Fall of 2005. While at Temple he plans to move back and forth between the narrative and documentary genres and perhaps to fuse them together into some sort of sculpture.
Drawing, painting, writing and photographing most of her life, Rini Keagy came to film by way of the arts, travel, and maps. Her homes have included farms and cities in Guatemala, California, Spain, Hawaii, France and Indonesia. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley she studied Geography and Cartography. Her hand-drawn thematic map "Unusual Fruits of Indonesia" won the 15th Annual National Geographic Society Award in Cartography. The previous semester, she had studied in Yogyarkarta, on the island of Java, Indonesia, where she photographed and interviewed contemporary Indonesian artists for an essay documenting their collaboration with Dutch artists. After four years of work as cartographer and photo editor at Lonely Planet Publications in their Oakland and Paris offices, Rini began working with Thirteen/WNET in New York City on "Egg the arts show", a weekly documentary on the arts broadcast on PBS. While a graduate student at Temple she has worked on Scribe Video’s Precious Places Community History Project and taught documentary video to high school students in Havana, Cuba. Her recent films have described the diasporic and multicultural experience of ‘in-between-ness’ through her own interpretation of surrealism.
Ellen grew up in the Midwest and then in northern New Jersey. She received her BA in English from Haverford College. After graduation she moved to Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras where she volunteered for two years with a Non Governmental Organization called ASONOG which deals with issues relating to municipal development. Her work in ASONOG’s Communications Department showed her the importance of documentary video and media design to tiny Central American NGOs and partially inspired her application to Temple’s FMA program. Since returning to the Philadelphia area in 2004, she has worked in an immigration and Social Security law firm and taught junior high English and Spanish.
L. Capco Lincoln, born and raised in Gainesville, FL, left to study
film and video at Antioch College, making i'm not other, aka ay mestiza. (1998, video) which screened at several festivals, including Frameline in San Francisco. Lincoln's other films include home (1999, 16mm) and Found Our Way (2006, 16mm), which screened at the Black Lily Film Festival and the Dance
Boom Film Festival. Found Our Way aired on DUTV in 2007.
Lincoln, committed to alternative and community-based media since age fifteen, published zines at the Gainesville Freedom School, started low-power FM radio stations in Florida and Ohio, hosted a short-wave radio program in Costa Rica, assisted Nick Deocampo at the Mowelfund Institute in the Phillipines, and worked on Academy-Award nominated filmmaker Anne Bohlen's documentary Toxic Tours. In Philadelphia, Lincoln currently works with the Asian Arts Initiative, Scribe Video Center, and the Media Mobilizing Project.
Lincoln's current documentary-in-progress, Autobiography of an
Ocean has screened at Ohio Weslyan University, the Hippodrome
Theater in Gainesville, and Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia.
Naima Lowe writes, performs, directs, studies, makes movies, teaches, lives and loves in Philadelphia, PA. She’s currently working on creative and curatorial projects that focus on her favorite things: Queers, people of color, the art they make, and the worlds they devise. For more detailed information visit her website at www.naimalowe.com.
As a student in Temple University's Film and Media Arts MFA program, Ian is currently in the midst of exploring all avenues of media production. Prior to his coming to Temple, Ian earned his BA in Critical Studies in Media Arts from the University of Arizona where his studies largely focused on media theory. While a devout film enthusiast enthralled with nearly all aspects of film form, Ian has a particular affinity for the avant-garde. This attraction has resulted in his current exploration of nonnarrative filmmaking and installation art. Ian is currently the President of the MFA Association.
Lindsey Martin hails from the booming suburbs of Northern Virginia. She received her BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 2005. Although she is now drawing influences from Philadelphia's urban landscape, the looming blue ridge mountains of her youth will always be identifiable in her work. Lindsey hopes to explore the genre of experimental narrative film and stop animation approaching topics such as gender identity, body image, and the microcosms of family structure. Lindsey enjoys describing human relationships through movement and a direction style that focuses (non) actors as conduits of feeling. Her influences do not seem to be directly of the art world but more a menlange of day to day life experiences.
Ashley Maynor was born and raised in Tennessee and received her BA in French Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As a 2004-2005 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, she researched French and Polish literature and film at the University of Michigan. While in Ann Arbor, Ashley served as a programmer and selection committee member for the 43rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, one of the nation’s longest standing film festivals.
In addition to teaching 16mm filmmaking and Screenwriting at Temple, Ashley has taught workshops as a video facilitator for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Community History Project. She is currently completing her MFA thesis, a new media essay about her grandmother’s obsessive photography habit. Ashley currently resides in Roanoke, Virginia, where she is General Manager of The Lyric, a historic, independent movie theatre.
Mary McDermott is a writer and a fiction film and video maker. She is currently writing her thesis project — a short comedy/noir to be shot later this year. Mary tackles religious and political issues in her work.
Muscle Joe Latino
Amateur lover, mediocre piano player, decent sound producer and outstanding Chilean pizza cook, looking for a long-lasting relationship with an easy going camera in her thirties (could be younger, though). We can listen to some old music together or just walk around the city. I want an honest friendship that may evolve into something else…? Call me.
David Moore graduated from Ithaca College in 2006 with a Bachelor's degree in Cinema and Photography. His undergraduate work includes the fair use film "Fairy Use," co-created with colleague Jeremy Levine, which has aired on Free Speech TV. For his undergraduate cinema thesis, David created a multimedia "personal archive," using home movie footage, baby books, and web interviews to track twenty years of banality and conflict in his immediate family. His interests include visual anthropology, fair use in documentary films, home movies, music writing, and the wonderful world of Disney's enduring media hegemony.
Hailing from Knoxville, TN., Paul Myers-Davis attended the College of Charleston and received his B.A. in Arts Management. He has tried to maintain a broad range of knowledge of all the arts, especially visual and film. In the past, he worked with independent producer, Peter Wentworth who sparked the idea of coming to Temple. Recently, Paul worked as a production assistant and researcher on spots for South Carolina Parks Recreation and Tourism, Dukes Mayonnaise, and a travel based documentary. His personal work includes Scattered, Smothered, Covered, a short documentary that was accepted at the Woodstock Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival to name a few. The documentary explores the food, the people, and the way of life that surrounds the Waffle House, a southern institution. His area of focus is narrative screenwriting and direction.
Ted Nanniceli graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 2002 with a BA in English and Film Studies. While in Atlanta, he made a half-hour documentary about the National Urban Coalition for Unity and Peace. From 2002 until 2004, Ted was in Cape Verde with the U.S. Peace Corps where he taught english in a local highschool and at the Instituto Superior de Educação. At Temple, Ted is making the transition from film theory to film production, discovering which areas of production most interest him, while exploring cognitivism, representations of the male body, and constructions of masculinity.
Aliza Nimon entered Temple's MFA Program shortly after completing her M.A. in Contemporary History at the University of Sussex In England. While writing her dissertation, she co-wrote, directed and edited The Other Invasion, a twenty-five minute documentary on African-American soldiers serving in Britain during World War II, for which she received the Best Documentary award at the Imperial War Museum student film festival. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, she accidently triple majored in History, English and Women's Studies. Since coming to Temple, she has focused on audio aesthetics, as well as comedy in both narrative and documentary film. In her spare time, she has been developing an urban planning proposal to surround Philadelphia by three lakes instead of two rivers.
Jonathan Olshefski was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2004 he graduated with a BA in English Literature and Film and Media Arts from Temple University. There he was first exposed to new media and interactive narrative. In the years following he continued to develop his aesthetic: engaging in urban documentary projects, teaching photography and working as a web designer in the commercial field. He has also become more and more rooted in the culture of Philadelphia's diverse neighborhoods and the organic process of recovery, reconciliation and healing.
His ambition is to collect the stories and experiences of the city, expressed in multiple forms (visual, aural, textual, concrete, abstract, documentary, allegory, experimental), and synthesize the pieces together in an interactive world that reflects the chaotic and mysterious world we live in, a culmination of all of the intensity, beauty and tragedy that swirls around us everyday, a world that is dynamic and demands choice. As an interactive form the intended experience mirrors the desired result: participation. His ultimate desire is to encourage positive action and interaction among the segregated populations of Philadelphia through storytelling and equal relationships.
View his work here: http://myfaeriestory.com
Dorothea came to Philadelphia as a Fulbright scholar from Berlin, Germany, where she spent the last six years studying, working, interning, assisting and enjoying life. During her undergraduate course in European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam her work concentrated on video documentary production and the creation of films from still photographs. Volunteering for the British Red Cross in Liverpool, England, working for the Festival of German Film in Melbourne, Australia, and doing research in Moscow, Russia, focused her interest on cultural awareness and inter-cultural communication, adaptation and creation. She hopes to delve more into these topics during her stay in the United States and her time at Temple.
Tracy's academic route to the MFA program has been almost completely serendipitous. With an undergraduate degree in Commerce in her home country, India, she almost jumped on the MBA bandwagon, but thanks to some wise words, she jumped ship, country, degree (and senses according to some) to complete her M.A in Broadcasting at Temple. With this second wind, she dabbled in some video production, rubbed shoulders with the film school and once again, after some more verbal wisdom, decided to switch over to the "dark side". Her time at Temple as a student and a teacher has spawned and fuelled her interest in Media Education. She believes strongly and passionately in the empowerment of children and youth, and in teaching them to find their voice, particularly those with learning disabilities, emotional disorders and the socially disenfranchised. She was awarded the Fred Rogers Memorial Scholarship in June '07 to work on a series of projects that involve children recording personal video diaries that illustrate the ways they navigate their lives, with a vision to translate these into new media forms. She hopes to hone her current fledgling abilities as a filmmaker to speak out thematically of education, faith and family, creating work that questions, probes and demonstrates.
Tom Quinn grew up in Bucks County, PA, where he directed a few short films including Via Bicycles, a 2006 Eastman Scholars finalist. His current feature film, The New Year Parade, was one of ten projects selected for the 2007 IFP Narrative Rough Cut Labs. The Labs paired Tom with producers Scott Macaulay (Raising Victor Vargas) and Gretchen McGowan (HDNet Films), editors Sabine Hoffman (Personal Velocity) and Kate Williams (Interview), composer Mychael Danna (Little Miss Sunshine, The Ice Storm) and other industry veterans to shape his project. He is currently working toward his MFA at Temple University. More info at: www.thenewyearparade.com
Vedran was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1996, he moved to Chicago where he studied graphic design and film at the University of Illinois. Since 2001, Vedran worked as a videographer, video editor, youth media educator, and film festival organizer in Chicago. He also taught in the post-production department at Columbia College Chicago as an adjunct instructor. At Temple University, Vedran's work and
research focuses on documentary and experimental film, but also collaborative/open source video and interactive new media.
www.vedranre.com
www.videi.org - summer video production/video blogging workshop for youth in Jajce, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Jen Schneider is the recipient of a 2007 CINE Golden Eagle for her short, Something Rubber, Something Glue, which won “Best Narrative” at the 2006 Diamond Screen festival and went on to screen at Atlanta Film Festival (2006) and MadCat International Women’s Film Festival (2007). In May 2007, Jen had a baby named Jack. She is currently in pre-production for a fiction short, “Crossroads,” which she will direct in April/May 2008. For her MFA thesis, she is developing a feature-length narrative titled “Little L.A.” that follows the disintegration of a high school theater director when he becomes obsessed with his latest protégé.
Jamaican-born Cheraine Stanford is an MFA candidate in Temple University’s Film and Media Arts program. Cheraine started film school at Temple in the fall of 2004 after covering crime, education and government for two years for The Charlotte Observer newspaper in Charlotte, N.C. Cheraine’s journalism training has contributed to her desire to make documentaries with conscience. Cheraine is also interested in using her background as a Jamaican native growing up and living in America to create work that confronts the ever- changing status of immigrants in this country. Cheraine earned her Bachelor of Arts in Literature, with a Media Studies concentration from Duke University in Durham, N.C. While there, she wrote, produced and directed a 15-minute documentary about the experiences of black students at the predominantly white school called The Lion’s Tale: A Documentary of the Black Experience at Duke. The video won Duke’s Hal Kammerer Memorial Award in Film and Video, the Undergraduate Filmmaker Award in 2002 and a spot at Durham’s documentary festival: Documentary Film and Video Happening.
Nien-Tsu Tzou earned her B.A. in Economics at National Taiwan University in Taipei and her Master degree in Media Studies in New School for Social Research in New York. After she graduated from New School, she went back to Taiwan and worked as a writer and reporter. She had two books published in Taiwan. She has been to Cannes Film Festival three times to cover the news for the best-selling newspaper in Taiwan. Nien-Tsu won a grant from Taiwanese government to support her study in film making. She enjoys Temple as an environment that allows her to explore all aspects of film/media making.
Hector Falcon Villa grew up on Queretaro - a middle sized charming mexican town. An early liking to shoot his own narrative home videos took him to complete his B.A. in Communication Sciences at Tecnologico de Monterrey, with special interest in media and film production. Looking for new international experiences he received his M.A. in Applied Creativity in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Hector is particularly interested in the creative and constructive sense of audiovisual language, as well as its potential to portrait the human concerns beyond rationality. Back in Queretaro he won experience writing, producing and directing for film, video and radio. Since 2000 he has been teaching Creativity, Audiovisual and Video Production courses for the undergraduate level. He co-wrote two narrative short films: “… Ni de día” (2003) directed by Luis Gonzalez and “The Perfect Day” (2004) directed by Bernardo Loyola, before doing his own surrealistic-erotic-comedy “All about it” (2007) with the sponsor of Mexican National Film Office. His work has been broadcast in Mexican and Latin American television, and shown in international film festivals including Tribeca, Palm Spring, LA Latino, Fort Lauderdale, Expresion en Corto and the Interfilm of Berlin. Before coming to Temple as a Fulbright scholar, Hector was director of the Tec de Monterrey’s Centro de Medios and a faculty member of the communication department.
I was born in Shenyang and earned my BA in Television Directing at Communication University of China. In 2004, I went on the “Western Sunshine Campaign”, a voluntary program, and made a documentary about one of the poorest villages in the Western China. One year later, after the documentary was broadcasted in Chinese Travel Channel and shown in 30 major universities, I returned the village and found it completely changed—there is booming tourism, running water, electricity. From then on, I believe film-making can be life-giving, with its unparalleled visual power. Then, I founded University DV Society, the first and the largest of its kind on the Chinese campus, and organized the University film&video festival, producing a profound impact in the region. My works include documentaries which aired on Chinese Travel Channel, and also drama, experimental and narrative video, some of which won major prizes in intercollegiate competitions.
Born in a Chinese filmmaker's home, Lu got his B.A. in Beijing Film Academy in 2004 and eventually made determinations to take film as his lifetime career. Lu made several documentaries concerning low-class people and their lives in Chinese rural areas, they were aired on major TV channels in China, some of them won the national awards in Beijing and Hongkong. After nomination to talent campus of 2004 Berlin Film Festival, Lu went to U.S. to pursue his MFA degree in Temple University. Under the free atmosphere, Lu is planning his first feature film and wants to refocus on local Chinese themes with global humanities and consciousness.
Brandon Watz goes to Temple University. He learns about Film in the MFA program. Prior to this he did a great number of things. He cannot remember all of them. That’s impossible. He began doing things in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of zero. Eighteen years later he went to New Orleans. That’s where he studied Psychology and Computer Science at Tulane University. After college he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland and tried to understand the English spoken there. Later he moved to Paris, France and tried to understand the French spoken there. He also lived in Boulder, Colorado and did computational cognitive neuroscience research. He likes to make films. He hopes that you like to watch films.
Daniel Van Wert is a 27-year-old Philadelphia native. He earned an undergraduate degree in English with a focus in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 2002. Daniel has published poetry in literary journals, Gumbo and You Are Here from the University of Arizona Press. A member of the Screen Actors Guild, Daniel has appeared in over thirty-five films including Invincible, Lady In The Water, Shooter, and 2 Minutes Later, as well as various television programs, advertisements and music videos. He aspires to learn and participate in all facets of filmmaking, but has a particular interest in narrative screen-writing and adaptation.
Born on the southernmost tip of the Asian continent, in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, Gary lived in Canada for three and a half years in Windsor, Toronto and Vancouver before moving to Philadelphia. While crossing the Malaysia-Singapore border on a daily basis for 10 years from the age of 7, he was immersed in the flourishing cross-border trade (amongst his classmates) of chewing gum and pirated CDs, and occasionally participated. From this earliest brush with transnationalism and the experience of multiple border-crossings, he acquired an early sense of global citizenship, and the possibilities that accompany.
At 21, while still an undergrad at the University of Windsor, Ontario, he traveled widely in Brazil, shooting, directing and co-producing, as one-half of a two-person crew, a documentary about international volunteerism, with support of the Fundamed Foundation in Maranhão, north-eastern Brazil. He returned to graduate top in his program in Oct. 2005, with an Honours B.A. in Communication Studies, completed in less than 3 years.
Gary is invested in work that reflects the ever-expanding, modern diasporic experiences of transnational, multiethnic, and other diverse communities that transcend traditional boundaries of identity. He has his heart in narrative and documentary filmmaking.
He is a founding member of Fé Media, a full-service media production and communications firm: www.femediaonline.com
