graduate students
First Years
Jon Barr |
Second YearsAndrew BatemanAggie Ebrahimi Santiago Loera Alexis McCrimmon Natasha Ngaiza Lisa Marie Patzer Carolina Roca-Smith Elaine Segal Ilya Simakov |
Third YearsChinonye ChukwuKatya Gorker Bruce James Lindsey Martin David Miranda David Moore Jonathan Olshefski Sara Suleman Hector Falcon Villa Peng Wan Brandon Watz Dan Van Wert |
Fourth Years
Laura Deutch | Fifth Years |
Jon Barr (first year)
Jon Barr is a filmmaker from Philadelphia who recently relocated to eastern New Mexico. Jon has worn many hats including restaurant manager, corporate sales rep, and landscape gardener. He decided to return to school and study filmmaking in his mid 30’s and hasn’t looked back since. He has worked in various forms and mediums, but leans towards directing narratives on film that have non-traditional structures. Jon’s work explores themes of perception and reality as well as the relationship between student and mentor. In addition to directing his own work, Jon enjoys helping other artists realize their projects and has been a successful producer and assistant director on several projects. His secret superpower is the ability to recognize hidden talents in others. Jon is fluent in Spanish and is an excellent chef. His undergraduate thesis, The Paradigm Shift, was a 26 minute short film shot on Super 16mm. In two years, it has screened in over 15 festivals and has won several awards. He hopes to graduate quickly so he can teach and make movies and be with his wife and kids in New Mexico.
Andrew Bateman (second year)
Andrew is a bit of a gypsy having traipsed across the United States and as a result calls many places and no place home. He earned his BA in Political Science from Metropolitan State College of Denver and his MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico where he wrote his thesis on Sun Ra and the politics of performance. Sun Ra bended his mind a bit too much to pursue a PhD and figured creating beauty is the way to go. Andrew has made documentaries on the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, calypso music, and access to healthcare for working-class New Mexicans.
Malia Bruker (first year)
Malia Bruker is a film and video writer/producer who hopes to create media that will engage, educate, and inspire. Her recent tenure at the national news and documentary channel Free Speech TV gave her the opportunity to understand the many facets of the independent media world. As Production Manager and occasional Writer and Producer for the award-winning news magazine SourceCode, she helped lead a national community of independent filmmakers to produce news that is traditionally ignored in mainstream media. She was a key member in the development of Free Speech TV’s flagship daily news and discussion show GRITtv with Laura Flanders. She was also the Co-creator, Producer and Writer for the weekly dialogue program The Activist Studio. She has also produced and managed various live productions for Free Speech TV, including live coverage of the 2008 elections. Prior to her time at Free Speech TV, Malia worked on a number of award-winning documentary and narrative productions at Florida State University, where she received her Bachelor’s Degree. She is currently studying at Temple University to learn more about the art of storytelling, long-form documentary and non-fiction approaches to narrative forms.
Phally Chroy (fifth year)
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.
Marc D'Agostino (fifth year)
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.
Laura Deutch (fourth year)
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.
Aggie Ebrahimi (second year)
Aggie Ebrahimi is calling all superheroes and profiteers to band together and fight the ills of ignorance, complacence, lovelessness and irresponsible media. In her quest to amass the most righteous and most excellent team, she has spent four years studying in the Psychology department at Georgia Tech, two years with the Masters and practitioners of Multicultural Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia, and several years briefing and communing with her family members in Iran. She has served as a steward of the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative's Freedom on Film website (www.uga.edu/civilrights), and she is currently scouting Temple University's Film and Media Arts MFA program, where she is sure to find what she seeks and much, much more. In a few years, she hopes to take this dream team public, consolidated as (non-profit) independent media makers by day and crusaders for justice by day and night. Stay tuned for our next installment!
Julia Fuller (fourth year)
Julia has always been interested in too many things. She might have been a vet, an architect, a traveling food critic, a neuroscientist, a designer, a doctor, a farmer, a dancer, an urban planner, a social worker….but as of now she is a filmmaker and photographer. She hopes to research and participate in these fields through film, thereby satisfying some of her interests and communicating them through what she enjoys most: composing beautiful rectangles.
Truly Gomez (first year)
Truly Gomez a.k.a. Santiago Soto is an Ecuadorian artist. He has directed several works as a filmmaker (shorts/videoclips/documentaries/videoart/videodance) but has recently discovered that in the world of the arts sculpture can be an umbrella that engulfs video as well as other media to output more conceptual work. So he wants to become a sculptor. He just co-wrote “Saudade”, a movie that got financed to become a feature film. His band, Queen Size Bed, is ready to put their first record on vynil, which will be called Standard Handbook for Secretaries. He also founded the poetic collective Sexo Idiota in his hometown Quito, which is rioting the new poetry scene of the region. For this guy spanglish is a big thing and so is socialism and comics.
Haitao Guo (first year)
Haitao Guo grew up in China. He graduated from Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, Hubei Province with a B.S. in Biochemistry. After he got a M.S in Microbiology at Texas A&M University in 2007, he realized that what he really wanted to do is making films. He joined the MFA program at Temple University in 2009 and began his transition from a scientist to an artist. He is pretty happy with his new life in Philadelphia now.
Katya Gorker (third year)
Katya Gorker was born in Moscow on the day Chairman Mao died. She immigrated to the U.S with her family at the tail end of the cold war 80’s and became an incidental product of bicultural identity. She received her BFA in Filmmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art. Upon graduating, Katya spent the next 6 years massaging celluloid as an arthouse and film festival projectionista, itinerant archivist and multimedia curator. In 2000, she co-founded the Berwick Research Institute, a 501 c-3 not-for-profit arts organization that nurtures the experimentation of conceptually challenging work from emerging artists outside the pressures of commercial production. Her interests in film range from the immediacy of digital media’s impact on time and collective memory to personal ethnography and the shifting locations of cultural identity. Her work at Temple plays on the mutable boundaries of narrative and explores the visceral nature of the cinematic image.
Bruce James (third year)
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.
Ben Kalina (fifth year)
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.
Ellen Knechel (fourth year)
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.
Joseph A Kraemer (first year)
Joe Kraemer hails from Wisconsin, having called Madison, Milwaukee, and now Philly his home. He has a BFA in Film from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, which he attended from 2004 to 2008. He also interned for the Milwaukee International Film Festival in 2007 and has done work for local production companies there. His short films have screened modestly at several film festivals in the Midwest and that small taste of success has left him wanting more. Joe has a particular love for animation, sound design, music, and cinematography. He hopes to explore a hybrid of narrative and documentary and finds his inspiration in the films of the French New Wave, especially Agnes Varda.
L. Capco Lincoln (fourth year)
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.
Lindsey Martin (third year)
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.
Alexis McCrimmon (second year)
Alexis McCrimmon is a multimedia artist and filmmaker of Midwestern origins. Her media work ranges in mode, incorporating performative documentary, hybrid narrative strategies as well as elements of collage cinema. Currently, she is developing a new series of works exploring the theme of nostalgia and the transformation of public and private landscapes. Alexis’ film/video work has screened at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Frameline 32, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MIXNYC and the Boston LGBT Film Festival.
David Miranda (third year)
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 (third year)
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.
Natasha Ngaiza (second year)
Tanzanian by blood and raised on 3 different continents, Natasha received her B.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from The College of William and Mary, after which she spent 3 years fundraising for non-profits on the mean streets of D.C. Her interests include: creating new spaces for "resistant Black spectatorship", guerrilla filmmaking in neo-colonialist and capitalist society, African oral traditions, exploring social and political issues affecting people of the African Diaspora, early silent films and the horror genre. She is currently working on "Mammy", an experimental film about the implications of the racist caricature in contemporary American culture.
Jonathan Olshefski (third year)
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
Lisa Marie Patzer (second year)
Lisa Marie Patzer’s work is grounded in her experience as a performance and video artist. Emphasizing the use of rhythm, metaphor and aesthetic experience, she approaches the moving image as a performative medium. Her current interests include utilizing the aesthetic characteristics of tele-visual and digital imagery as metaphor for inter-subjective experience; the use of sensors and live video processing to create interactive video installations; and theoretical explorations of the virtual/physical body. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including venues such as the BuntPort Theatre (Denver, Colorado), the American Airlines Center (Dallas, Texas), The Lab Gallery (San Francisco, California), The University of Northampton, (Northampton, UK) and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Examples of her work can be viewed on her website: www.lisamariepatzer.com
Tracy Pereira (fourth year)
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 (fifth year)
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 Residbegovic (fourth year)
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
Ilya Simakov (second year)
Ilya was born in 1984 in a small Russian town of Dolgoderevenskoye. When he was 6, his family moved to Chelyabinsk, a large industrial town nearby. During adolescent years, he caught onto some interests, which continue to follow him: cinema, kitsch, electronic music, and absurdist art.
In 2006 Ilya graduated from Connecticut College in New London, CT with a degree in Film Studies. At Temple Ilya plans to occupy himself with acquisition and polishing of filmmaking skills. His interests include creating a genre-free multi-tonal cinema, experimenting with video art and theater, and becoming in equal parts an attentive and modern director and an apt and imaginative cinematographer. Ilya is also looking to contribute to film world through teaching. He is constantly searching for collaborators, specifically actors, performers, editors, set, costume, and sound designers, musicians, and artists in general. Ilya is also happy to make himself available to work on projects in director and camera crews.
Sara Suleman is from Karachi, Pakistan. She works in various media from video to installation. http://www.sarasuleman.com
Hector Falcon Villa (third year)
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.
Peng Wan (third year)
Peng Wan got his B.A. from Communication University of China. He is interested in narrative films and post-production. He just shot a short HD video this summer with his friend Lizhi Zhao and Xiaolin Yu in Beijing. He is editing the footage these days.
Brandon Watz (third year)
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 (third year)
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.
Gary Yong (fourth year)
Born in Malaysia, raised partly in Singapore, Yong lived in Canada before moving to the US and is currently based in Philadelphia. Grounded in the physical experience of border-crossing, his work attempts to describe a fluid state of being outside and between borders, unprotected and unclaimed, yet also liberated. He is currently at work on his first feature. The film utilizes a hybrid form that sometimes documents, and other times elaborately stages and fantasizes the experiences of a group of foreigners in Philadelphia, played by a company of professional and non-professional actors whose specific national/ethnic origins resemble those of their characters. Visit: www.fluidrace.com/yot He also works commercially as a freelance motion designer and produces design-centered multimedia content for web/print/broadcast. Visit www.garyyong.com