Projects
The Film and Media Arts Department is continually involved in a wide variety of film projects, keeping its students and faculty current on industry developments while maintaining strong ties with cinema professionals.
STUDENT PROJECTS
FMA continues to rank first in the country’s most important student film competitions.
In 2008, an MFA student’s widescreen super-16 mm dramatic film won first place as the Best Student Film in the United States and Canada, being named the 2008 Eastman Scholar Gold Award Winner in the prestigious Eastman Scholar national competition. Another student won the 2008 Best Feature Film Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, one of the major alternative independent festivals to Sundance, with a film that also was nominated for a Gotham Award and screened at the Museum of Modern Art. A third student was a finalist in the documentary category for the 2008 Student Academy Awards. MFA alumna Heidi Saman’s dramatic production The Maid filmed in Egypt premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival as one of 17 juried student films from around the world and was a Princess Grace Honoree (The Grace Kelly Foundation).
FACULTY PROJECTS
Faculty members are award-winning filmmakers whose works are shown internationally.
- Locations where professors have shot footage range from Sri Lanka to Puerto Rico to Paris. Their work has premiered at international film festivals in Moldova; Athens, Greece; Sofia, Bulgaria; Dallas, Texas; Provincetown, Mass., Athens, Ohio and New York City.
- Faculty films also have debuted or been screened at such sites as the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, Horizon House, Hahnamann Hospital, tUPenn Collaborative/UPenn School of Medicine, Drexel University, the Ner Tamid Synagogue, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the George Eastman House, Cornell Cinema, the Film Forum in L.A., and Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
- Subject matter of their documentaries includes civil rights, unsung women who developed computer technology during World War II, the Sri Lankan tsunami that claimed 295,000 lives, a portrait of the country’s most prominent living African American, a Philadelphia homeless woman, life stories of prisoners and Old Faithful.
- Faculty member produce media installations and exhibits, create experimental animation and study the use of narrative in interactive gaming environments. They spearheaded such projects as digitally re-mastering TV episodes for distribution via web sites or iTunes and also co-produced the video tour project for the city of Philadelphia.
- Award-winning articles, essays and reviews written by FMA professors have been published in Cinema Journal, Screen, Scope, American Anthropologist and Script & Pitch Insights, which is sponsored by the Media Committee of the European Union.
- They have presented papers and lectures at University Film & Video Association conference; the Society for Cinema & Media Studies annual conference; the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Singapore; the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, Washington and the Media Development & Policy Symposium at the University of Shanghai.
- Faculty members publish books on such subjects as the British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946, (Cambridge University Press, 2008) as well as chapters for books published by Oxford University Press, the University of Minnesota Press and Yeditepe University Press in Turkey.
- FMA professors also have received fellowships and support from the Sundance Institute and the Fulbright, Onassis, Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Annenberg foundations.