Featured Artists, Writers, and Scholars
Alberto Arvelo is a Venezuelan feature film director whose work spans narrative and documentary. His most recent film, Tocar y Luchar, was well received at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. His work in film and television includes Habana, Havana (2004), Los Ultimos (2001), Casa con Vista al Mar (A House with a View of the Sea) (2001), and Una Vida y Dos Mandados (One Life and Two Trails) (1997), La Canción de la Montaña (1986), and Candelas en la Niebla (1986). Currently, Arvelo is working on what he calls, “cine atomo” a kind of filmmaking that relies on only small budgets and small crews to produce inexpensive but intense films. Tocar y Luchar was profiled this year at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles and will screen in New York City at the end of October. His first documentary, Tocar y Luchar profiles the National Youth Orchestras of Venezuela—a hopeful vision of musical young people who battle tremendous odds in Venezuelan society.
Siona Benjamin is a painter originally from Bombay. She currently resides in the United States. Her work reflects her background of having been raised Jewish in predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. Her paintings combine imagery of her past with the role she finds she often assumes in America today. These transnational ideas form a mosaic inspired by both Indian miniature paintings and Sephardic Jewish icons. Her first M.F.A. is in painting, and her second M.F.A. is in theater set design. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Jewish Week in New York City and New Jersey, Boston Globe, Art in America, Art New England, Art and Antiques, and Moment magazine.
Jeff Claus is associate professor of education at Ithaca College, working as a community collaborator addressing equity, race, and diversity in education. He is also a founding member, writer, vocalist, and guitarist of the internationally acclaimed and groundbreaking folk-rooted alternative rock band the Horse Flies, and of the nationally recognized alternative rock band Boy with a Fish. He has appeared on MTV, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Prairie Home Companion, and World Café. He co-composed scores for two feature films, Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom. With Judy Hyman, Claus has also composed feature film scores for The Year That Trembled and Disappearances, as well as two PBS documentaries, Through Deaf Eyes and John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature. Several of Claus’s songs have been recorded by other artists, including Natalie Merchant and Fiery Furnaces, and his songs have been used by MTV and Oliver Stone.
Jay Craven (FLEFF distinguished independent film director) is a screenwriter, film director, and producer. His credits include the award-winning feature films, Where the Rivers Flow North (1994), A Stranger in the Kingdom (1998), and The Year That Trembled (2002). His other credits include the Emmy Award–winning television series Windy Acres (2004) and the short films High Water (1989), Gayleen (1986), and Dawn of the People (1984). He has been a leading figure in the independent feature film movement in the United States. He has also worked on casting and as a production consultant for the feature films Spitfire Grill and Ethan Frome. In 1991, Craven cofounded Kingdom County Productions (KCP), a nonprofit organization established for the purpose of developing regional literary works into film (most prominently Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom). Craven’s awards include the 1998 Vermont Governor’s Award for artistic excellence. His feature films have been screened widely in national and international film festivals, garnering top awards and critical acclaim. His feature film work has been supported through prestigious grants including one from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the MacDowell Colony.
Peter Dodge* is a musician and composer. A graduate of the Ithaca College School of Music, Dodge has performed in a variety of genres including classical, folk, rock, Afro-Caribbean, and experimental jazz. He has collaborated with choreographers, poets, storytellers, painters, sculptors, ritual artists, and filmmakers. He is a multi-instrumentalist and a collector. He is also part of the Hospicare music program.
Gene Endres has been an engineer at Ithaca College for 26 years, and for 25 of those years he has also hosted Hobo’s Lullaby, the WICB folk radio show. Quirky and slightly out of control, the program, he says, “has no rules because they never told me there were rules.” Having worked in science, electronics, journalism, and photography, Endres finds variety in his world—and ours.
Renate Ferro (Women Direct 26th Anniversary digital artist) is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. She received her M.F.A. in new media from Cornell University in 2004 after working as a freelance artist for over 20 years, where her creative process and art practice centered on drawing, painting, and printmaking. Her current installations incorporate projection, digital video, sound, and motion sensors. Her work is represented in both corporate and private collections across the United States, as well as in Canada, France, Germany, and Australia. Her artwork has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She currently serves as art editor of the journal Diacritics, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Her installations reinvent memory through a digital translation into new media experiences. Her installations include Mining Memory: The Virtual Trunk, Mining Memory: The Cabinet, Anamnesis, and Screen Memory.
Richard Fung (FLEFF distinguished media artist and writer in residence) is best known for his work in video having made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus, often through the lens of his Chinese Trinidadian Canadian heritage. His video works include Orientations (1984), Chinese Characters (1986), The Way to My Father's Village (1988), My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), and Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005). Fung’s work has been included in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, such as retrospectives at the 47th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Images Festival Pièces d’Identité at Rencontres Vidéo Arts Plastiques, Spotlight Tour at Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam, 2005), and Centre Bruxelles-Wallonie (Paris, 2005). Broadcasts have included DCTV, Vision TV (national Canadian broadcast), LA Freewaves, PBS Los Angeles, TV Ontario, Pridevision TV, and the Knowledge Network. His works are included in public collections and universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. As writer and critic, Richard Fung won the Ontario Association of Art Galleries award for curatorial writing in 2005. He has published extensively since 1980. With Monika Kin Gagnon he coauthored 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics in 2002. He has received a Rockefeller Fellowship, a McKnight Fellowship, a Toronto Arts Award, a Pioneer Award, and a Juror’s Choice Award. He was awarded the Bell Canada Award in video art in 2000.
Steven Ginsberg (James B. Pendleton professional in residence, Los Angeles) is a screenwriter who has worked extensively in both the independent and studio worlds. He wrote Family Prayers, an original coming-of-age drama starring Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Patti LuPone, and Paul Reiser, and has written and developed screenplays for such actors as Brenda Blethyn, Richard Dreyfuss, and Peter Fonda. His forays into television include a very brief staff writing job on the daytime drama General Hospital. He has also recently began writing for the stage where his new play, Nick and Katherine, was chosen as a semifinalist at this year’s Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and earned him a spot at the 2006 Kennedy Center Summer Playwrights Intensive in Washington, D.C. Ginsberg is currently professional in residence at the Ithaca College Los Angeles program and has taught screenwriting and served as a guest lecturer at such schools as University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and National University. He began his writing career as a reporter and film critic for Daily Variety and also worked in film marketing and publicity for such directors as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, and Lawrence Kasdan.
Steve Gordon served as executive vice president of creative affairs for Viacom Productions in television program development and production over a 20-year period. Under his aegis, nearly 2,000 hours of programming were produced, including several successful series: Ed for NBC; The Chris Isaak Show for Showtime; Emmy-nominated The 4400 for USA Network, which was the most-watched series premiere on basic cable; and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the most successful series in the company’s history. Currently Gordon does graduate work in the Park School where he consults on the Imagination Awards, a national competition; teaches television and radio writing at SUNY Cortland; produces the National College Television Awards for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and in his spare time, runs his own consulting website, Hollywood Creative Connection.
Vincent Grenier (FLEFF distinguished experimental artist) was born in Québec City, Canada, and has lived and worked for the last 30 years in the United States. He was a frequent contributor to the Montréal art scene of the 70s and 80s, as well as the San Francisco Bay area as an experimental film and video maker. Grenier’s films have been shown in the United States, Canada, and Europe at showcases such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema, and Cinéma Parallel in Montréal. He has made over two dozen films and videos, all of which have won numerous international and national awards and critical recognition. Seven of his films and videos were curated in the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970–2000 American Century Film program. Films by Grenier are included in the Donnell Media Library in New York City; the National Film Archive, Ottawa; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; AGO, Toronto; and at many other institutions in Canada and the United States. Grenier teaches in the cinema department at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Slawomir Grunberg (Central New York Filmmakers Showcase) was born in Lublin, Poland, and is a graduate of the Polish Film School in Lodz, where he studied cinematography and directing. He immigrated to the United States in 1981 and has since shot and produced over 40 television documentaries, including Legacy of Jedwabne, Borderline, Fenceline: A Company Town Divided, From Chechnya to Chernobyl, The Warsaw Ghetto, and School Prayer: A Community at War. Grunberg has also been a contributing director of photography and editor for many PBS series, including Frontline, American Masters, Nova, AIDS Quarterly, and People’s Century, as well as for HBO and Lifetime’s Intimate Portraits. A recipient of Guggenheim, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Soros Justice Media Fellowships, Grunberg has also received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000 he won an Emmy Award for his self-directed and coproduced documentary School Prayer: A Community at War.
Roger Hallas is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and visual studies. He is coeditor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, forthcoming 2007) and is currently completing a book, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness and the Queer Moving Image for Duke University Press.
Paul Hamill is a writer and poet. His poetry publications include a chapbook, Winter Mind (2003), a book, The Year of Blue Snow: Northern Poems (2001), several other chapbooks and pamphlets, and many poems in journals. A graduate of Boston College and Stanford, he lives in Ithaca and works as an administrator at Ithaca College. He is the current poet laureate of Tompkins County.
Cynthia Henderson is an assistant professor with Ithaca College’s Department of Theatre Arts. A professional performer for a number of years in the United States, Europe, and Africa, her Ithaca credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hangar Theatre, Lily in Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Callie in Stop Kiss at the Kitchen Theatre. Her New York City credits include A Wrinkle in Time at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and Dorothy Dandridge: An Evening of Song and Remembrance, Brother’s Keeper, and It’s Only a Play off Broadway. Her European credits include leading roles in Dreamgirls, Into the Woods, Children of a Lesser God, and Little Shop of Horrors. Henderson was acknowledged by the European Tournament of Plays with a best supporting actress in a musical award for her role in Little Shop of Horrors. African credits include Charlayne in Pretty Fire and a production of For Colored Girls, which she directed. Television credits include a starring role in UPN’s Ghost Stories, as well as numerous commercial and industrial credits. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright award.
Ishrat Hoque is a dancer. Her dance education began at the Bangladesh Academy of Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was exposed to various forms of dance styles of the South Asian region including Odissi, Manipuri, and traditional dances of the hill regions. In the United States, she has trained with Guru Selvi Chandranathan (Bharatnatyam), and Pandit Satya Narayan Charka (Kathak), and attended workshops with renowned Kathak dancers Pandit Birju Maharaj. Currently she is teaching at New York’s Lotus Music and Dance Studio. Her dance style is a unique fusion incorporating her diverse background in South Asian dance forms.
Dale Hudson received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004, taught cinema studies at Ithaca College and Syracuse University from 2004 to 2006, and is currently a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College. His research examines cinema and new media in relation to racialization, nationalism, immigration, and globalization, particularly within the contexts of the United States, France, and India. He has published articles in Refractory (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Screen (University of Glasgow, Scotland), as well as reviews of new media scholarship and digital archives in Afterimage. In spring 2006, he served on the faculty steering committee for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF). With Lisa Patti, he cocurated a preview event for FLEFF 2006 in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Northeast Historic Film, and the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.
Judy Hyman (FLEFF distinguished composer in residence) has roots in classical training, traditional fiddle music, and modern rock. She is a founding member of the alternative rock band the Horse Flies. She has toured extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and recorded seven albums with the Horse Flies, including releases on MCA and Rounder Records. The Horse Flies have been featured on MTV, Prairie Home Companion, All Things Considered, World Cafe and Mountain Stage and have been written about in Rolling Stone, Musician, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Hyman composes music for film, television, and multimedia. In May 2006 she was nominated for an Emmy by the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the musical composition/arrangement special achievement category. She has also scored two interactive DVDs for the National Library of Medicine titled Dream Anatomy and Changing the Face of Medicine. With Jeff Claus, she has scored two feature films (The Year That Trembled and Disappearances) and a video that will run at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. With the Horse Flies she played a leading role in composing the music for two feature film scores (Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom). She has toured with pop singer Natalie Merchant. She currently performs with Boy with a Fish, the Horse Flies, and several fiddle music bands.
Meg Jamieson is a filmmaker on the faculty of Ithaca College’s Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts. She has a background in writing, theater, and studio arts and completed her master’s and M.F.A. degrees at the University of Iowa. Her works are primarily in the area of nonfiction.
Ernesto Livon-Grosman, who was born in Argentina, lives in the United States where he teaches film and literature at Boston College. He is the director of Cartoneros, a feature-length documentary, which portrays the process of informal recycling in his native Buenos Aires. The documentary explores the connections between the recurrent social and political crisis, economic disintegration, and globalization that have affected Argentina during the last 50 years. He is now working on a series of short documentaries on the history of South American visual poetry.
Tim McCaskell (FLEFF distinguished activist in residence) is a veteran of equity activism in his home city of Toronto. A writer, educator, and activist, he served in the Toronto District School Board Equity Department as a student program worker from 1983 to 2001, where he was instrumental in developing, coordinating, and facilitating antiracist and equity programming for Toronto area schools and their constituents. He is a founding member of AIDS Action Now and is a major figure in international AIDS activism. Most recently, he is the author of Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality, a detailed view of the experiments, successes, and mistakes in the Toronto board of education’s quest to provide truly equitable education for a diverse student body. For almost three decades McCaskell and his colleagues fought to deliver antiracism, antisexism, and antihomophobia education. McCaskell’s astute blend of personal reflection and political theory illuminates a time of significant social struggle, cultural transformation, and deep learning.
Ulises Mejias* is an educator and technocultural theorist whose research interests include networked sociality, the philosophy of technology, and learning design. He is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University. His dissertation explores the redefinition of social relevancy by digital media and considers the limits of the network as a metaphor and model for organizing social realities. Previously, he was director of learning systems design at eCornell, a subsidiary of Cornell University. Mejias has published in various journals including First Monday, Innovate, Knowledge Tree, and Critical Issues in Media Communications, and has been nominated two years consecutively for an EduBlog award. He blogs at ideant.typepad.com.
Jonathan Miller returned to the United States in 2001 after working for 13 years as a journalist, writer, and editor in Southeast Asia and South America. He has produced hundreds of features and news reports for NPR, BBC, CBC, Marketplace, Weekend America, Monitor Radio, Voice of America, Radio Netherlands, Radio New Zealand, and Radio Deutsche Welle, and has written for the New Yorker, Life, Condé Nast Traveler, Parents, American Way, Christian Science Monitor, Far Eastern Economic Review, and many other publications. He has also served as a consulting writer and editor for several development institutions, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the U.N., Oxfam America, the International Rice Research Institute, the Nairobi-based Centre for Research in Agroforestry, the International Potato Center, and the Asian Development Bank. He cofounded and directed Our Place, a full-service daycare program for children of families living in homeless shelters in Seattle. Executive producer for Homelands Productions’ award-winning Worlds of Difference project (2002–2005), he was also editorial director of Think Global, the 2005 National Public Radio collaboration involving more than 300 stations and 30 national shows. He is currently executive producer of the World@Work series, and an affiliated scholar at the Polson Institute for Global Development at Cornell University.
Sarah Mkhonza (Ithaca City of Asylum writer in residence) is a writer, journalist, scholar, and activist from Swaziland. She was a professor at the University of Swaziland. In 2003 she managed to make her way to the United States with her two sons. Granted asylum in 2005, she taught at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, before coming to Cornell this August as a visiting scholar in Africana studies and English, and as a writer in residence for two years with Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA). Affiliated with Cornell’s Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy, ICOA provides sanctuary to writers in exile whose works have been suppressed. Mkhonza, who earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1996, will teach Zulu at the Africana Studies and Research Center this semester—the first time the language has been offered since the early 1990s. The author of two novels for young adults, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, Mkhonza is the recipient of a 2002 Hammett-Hellman Award from Human Rights Watch and a Novib/PEN Emergency Fund grant.
Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media artist. He founded Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org), which looks at post-9/11 security panic. Project excerpts have shown widely, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial. His film on Hawthorne effect and political Islam, Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie, was screened at the British House of Lords. The Young Man Was No Longer a Terrorist, an excerpt from a project on guerilla movements, premiered at Dictionary of War in Munich. His essays include “Terrorists or Guerillas in the Mist?” “Invisible Migrants,” “Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop,” and “Why Mahmud Can’t Be a Pilot.” He is currently cocurating System Error: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning at the Palazzo Papesse Museum in Siena.
Marion Nestle (Health promotion distinguished scholar in residence) is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1986 to 1988, she was senior nutrition policy adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. She has been a member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee and Science Board, the USDA/DHHS 1995 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and American Cancer Society committees that issue dietary guidelines for cancer prevention. She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002) and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (2003). In 2003, Food Politics won awards from the Association for American Publishers, James Beard Foundation, and World Hunger Year. Safe Food won the Steinhardt School of Education’s Griffiths Research Award in 2004. Her latest book, What to Eat, was published in May 2006.
Lisa Patti (is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell and a lecturer in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College. Her current research focuses on language and visuality in Hollywood and European cinemas, with a particular focus on the political economies of international coproductions.
Claudia Pederson is a third-year graduate student at the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She has a master’s degree in the history of art from Long Beach State, California. Her thesis is on tactical media activism. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the intersections between simulation technologies, the military, entertainment, and medicine, specifically addressing their convergence in experimental game design.
Giovanna Pollarolo is an internationally acclaimed screenwriter, novelist, poet, and journalist from Tacna, Peru. As a screenwriter for the acclaimed Peruvian film director Francisco Lombardi, she has written narrative screenplays for feature films such as La Boca del Lobo, Caidos del Cielo, Pantaleon y las Visitadoras, Tinta Roja, and others. She also writes for the premier newspaper of Lima and has a book of short stories Atado de Nervios. Her poetry books include Huerto de Olivos (1987), Entre Mujeres Solas (1991, 1996), La Ceremonia del Adios (1997). She is a professor at the Universidad del Pacifico. A major force in Latin America cinema and literature, her screen credits are impressive and highly acclaimed by critics and major film festival directors in Latin America, North America, and Europe.
Peter Rothbart* is a professor of music theory, history, and composition, and director of electroacoustic and recording studies at the Ithaca College School of Music. He is active as a composer, performer, writer, and artist, with performances and art shows throughout the United States, Europe, and Russia. He has published over 300 articles and is currently working on two books about film music. His music is published by Seesaw Press, Lorenzo Music, and the International Trumpet Guild.
Leah Shafer writes and teaches about film and theater. She has taught courses on subjects ranging from surrealism to Arnold Schwarzenegger. A blurb writer at heart, she has contributed to reference works on theater and American history, and for more than 10 years was senior writer of the Cornell Cinema Flicksheet. She is currently completing a dissertation on underpants, cars, and cake in the 80s films of John Hughes. An active videographer and theater practitioner, she recently assistant directed Beat Box Bard, an original piece that remixes Shakespeare text with beat-boxing and break-dancing. A longtime resident of the Ithaca area, she has been an instructor at both Ithaca College and Cornell University. She lives with her husband in Trumansburg, New York.
Brooke Singer is a locative media artist whose work with the Preemptive Media Collective has been exhibited and performed internationally. She works with ubiquitous computing technologies and interfaces such as RFID, air-monitor controls, scanners, cell phones, and other mobile media to investigate the ways in which power relations are now imbedded within hidden architectures. She and the Preemptive Media Collective were recently awarded the prestigious Eyebeam Fellowship to produce a series of interactive and performative works on air-quality monitoring. Singer’s work explores and blurs the borders between science, technology, politics, and arts practices.
Sharon Lin Tay is cocurator with Dale Hudson of the FLEFF online digital art exhibition, Undisclosed Recipients. She is a lecturer in film studies at Middlesex University in London, England, where she teaches film theory, world cinema, and digital culture. Born in Singapore, she was educated in Singapore, New Zealand, and England, and received her Ph.D. in film studies from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. Her work is sustained by a commitment to feminist politics and revolves around film theory, the specificities of filmic materiality, and filmmaking practices. She has published journal articles and book chapters on feminist film theory, Deleuze, world cinema, and women filmmakers, and writes for various film and media publications. She is currently working on projects about digital cinemas and the contemporary political documentary.
Craig Volk received his M.F.A. in playwriting/screenwriting from the Yale School of Drama. He spent the 90s in Los Angeles writing episodic TV on six writing staffs, including the Emmy-winning Northern Exposure. Volk has written six network pilots and scripted 25 hours of produced TV. As a playwright, his work has been produced at the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Actors Theater of Louisville, Yale Rep, and he was selected three times to participate at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Currently, Volk is head of dramatic writing at the University of Colorado at Denver/Colorado Film School and serves as executive consultant for the Colorado-based television series {noise : floor}, which he developed with Issac Slade of the Fray.
Chris White* is a classical, jazz, and improvisational cellist and cello teacher based in Ithaca, New York. He has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Europe, and North Africa. He has several solo recordings and has played on numerous recordings of other artists. He has a jazz book and CD series for string instruments called Jazz Cello, Jazz Viola, and Jazz Violin and has authored articles in national string and jazz magazines. His most recent CD release is called First Principles, which features his original compositions as well as originals by the pianist Eric Hangen. He performed with his jazz quartet at the First World Cello Congress (1988), the Quanzaine de Montreal (1992), the International New Directions Cello Association and Festival (1995, 1997, and 2001) and at the sixth American Cello Congress in Maryland (2001). He also performs regularly as a classical cellist with the Binghamton (New York) Symphony and frequently freelances with chamber and jazz groups. White is on the faculty of the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca, and he gives workshops on improvisation for cellists. White is the founder and director of the International New Directions Cello Association and Festival, now in its 13th year. He is a graduate of the Ithaca College School of Music.
Craig Volk received his M.F.A. in playwriting/screenwriting from the Yale School of Drama. He spent the 90s in Los Angeles writing episodic TV on six writing staffs, including the Emmy-winning Northern Exposure. Volk has written six network pilots and scripted 25 hours of produced TV. As a playwright, his work has been produced at the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Actors Theater of Louisville, Yale Rep, and he was selected three times to participate at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Currently, Volk is head of dramatic writing at the University of Colorado at Denver/Colorado Film School and serves as executive consultant for the Colorado-based television series {noise : floor}, which he developed with Issac Slade of the Fray.
Phil Wilde and Ann Michel (FLEFF distinguished multimedia producers in residence) have produced award-winning film, video, interactive, and digital media for three decades. They are the principals of Insights International, a production firm that specializes in science and educational nonfiction media for international clients. Their groundbreaking use of media has been widely recognized for bringing the real world into the classroom and the classroom into the real world. They have produced media for major museums, educational institutions, and organizations, professional and scientific associations, and corporations. Most recently they were awarded the blue ribbon for educational aids competition from the American Society of Agricultural Engineers. Michel and Wilde serve as technical consultants for the Light in Winter Festival, an annual festival in Ithaca that links science and the arts. They have been involved with the Robert Flaherty Film Seminars for over two decades.
* Ithaca College alumni
Alberto Arvelo is a Venezuelan feature film director whose work spans narrative and documentary. His most recent film, Tocar y Luchar, was well received at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. His work in film and television includes Habana, Havana (2004), Los Ultimos (2001), Casa con Vista al Mar (A House with a View of the Sea) (2001), and Una Vida y Dos Mandados (One Life and Two Trails) (1997), La Canción de la Montaña (1986), and Candelas en la Niebla (1986). Currently, Arvelo is working on what he calls, “cine atomo” a kind of filmmaking that relies on only small budgets and small crews to produce inexpensive but intense films. Tocar y Luchar was profiled this year at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles and will screen in New York City at the end of October. His first documentary, Tocar y Luchar profiles the National Youth Orchestras of Venezuela—a hopeful vision of musical young people who battle tremendous odds in Venezuelan society.
Siona Benjamin is a painter originally from Bombay. She currently resides in the United States. Her work reflects her background of having been raised Jewish in predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. Her paintings combine imagery of her past with the role she finds she often assumes in America today. These transnational ideas form a mosaic inspired by both Indian miniature paintings and Sephardic Jewish icons. Her first M.F.A. is in painting, and her second M.F.A. is in theater set design. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Jewish Week in New York City and New Jersey, Boston Globe, Art in America, Art New England, Art and Antiques, and Moment magazine.
Jeff Claus is associate professor of education at Ithaca College, working as a community collaborator addressing equity, race, and diversity in education. He is also a founding member, writer, vocalist, and guitarist of the internationally acclaimed and groundbreaking folk-rooted alternative rock band the Horse Flies, and of the nationally recognized alternative rock band Boy with a Fish. He has appeared on MTV, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Prairie Home Companion, and World Café. He co-composed scores for two feature films, Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom. With Judy Hyman, Claus has also composed feature film scores for The Year That Trembled and Disappearances, as well as two PBS documentaries, Through Deaf Eyes and John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature. Several of Claus’s songs have been recorded by other artists, including Natalie Merchant and Fiery Furnaces, and his songs have been used by MTV and Oliver Stone.
Jay Craven (FLEFF distinguished independent film director) is a screenwriter, film director, and producer. His credits include the award-winning feature films, Where the Rivers Flow North (1994), A Stranger in the Kingdom (1998), and The Year That Trembled (2002). His other credits include the Emmy Award–winning television series Windy Acres (2004) and the short films High Water (1989), Gayleen (1986), and Dawn of the People (1984). He has been a leading figure in the independent feature film movement in the United States. He has also worked on casting and as a production consultant for the feature films Spitfire Grill and Ethan Frome. In 1991, Craven cofounded Kingdom County Productions (KCP), a nonprofit organization established for the purpose of developing regional literary works into film (most prominently Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom). Craven’s awards include the 1998 Vermont Governor’s Award for artistic excellence. His feature films have been screened widely in national and international film festivals, garnering top awards and critical acclaim. His feature film work has been supported through prestigious grants including one from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the MacDowell Colony.
Peter Dodge* is a musician and composer. A graduate of the Ithaca College School of Music, Dodge has performed in a variety of genres including classical, folk, rock, Afro-Caribbean, and experimental jazz. He has collaborated with choreographers, poets, storytellers, painters, sculptors, ritual artists, and filmmakers. He is a multi-instrumentalist and a collector. He is also part of the Hospicare music program.
Gene Endres has been an engineer at Ithaca College for 26 years, and for 25 of those years he has also hosted Hobo’s Lullaby, the WICB folk radio show. Quirky and slightly out of control, the program, he says, “has no rules because they never told me there were rules.” Having worked in science, electronics, journalism, and photography, Endres finds variety in his world—and ours.
Renate Ferro (Women Direct 26th Anniversary digital artist) is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. She received her M.F.A. in new media from Cornell University in 2004 after working as a freelance artist for over 20 years, where her creative process and art practice centered on drawing, painting, and printmaking. Her current installations incorporate projection, digital video, sound, and motion sensors. Her work is represented in both corporate and private collections across the United States, as well as in Canada, France, Germany, and Australia. Her artwork has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She currently serves as art editor of the journal Diacritics, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Her installations reinvent memory through a digital translation into new media experiences. Her installations include Mining Memory: The Virtual Trunk, Mining Memory: The Cabinet, Anamnesis, and Screen Memory.
Richard Fung (FLEFF distinguished media artist and writer in residence) is best known for his work in video having made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus, often through the lens of his Chinese Trinidadian Canadian heritage. His video works include Orientations (1984), Chinese Characters (1986), The Way to My Father's Village (1988), My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), and Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005). Fung’s work has been included in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, such as retrospectives at the 47th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Images Festival Pièces d’Identité at Rencontres Vidéo Arts Plastiques, Spotlight Tour at Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam, 2005), and Centre Bruxelles-Wallonie (Paris, 2005). Broadcasts have included DCTV, Vision TV (national Canadian broadcast), LA Freewaves, PBS Los Angeles, TV Ontario, Pridevision TV, and the Knowledge Network. His works are included in public collections and universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. As writer and critic, Richard Fung won the Ontario Association of Art Galleries award for curatorial writing in 2005. He has published extensively since 1980. With Monika Kin Gagnon he coauthored 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics in 2002. He has received a Rockefeller Fellowship, a McKnight Fellowship, a Toronto Arts Award, a Pioneer Award, and a Juror’s Choice Award. He was awarded the Bell Canada Award in video art in 2000.
Steven Ginsberg (James B. Pendleton professional in residence, Los Angeles) is a screenwriter who has worked extensively in both the independent and studio worlds. He wrote Family Prayers, an original coming-of-age drama starring Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Patti LuPone, and Paul Reiser, and has written and developed screenplays for such actors as Brenda Blethyn, Richard Dreyfuss, and Peter Fonda. His forays into television include a very brief staff writing job on the daytime drama General Hospital. He has also recently began writing for the stage where his new play, Nick and Katherine, was chosen as a semifinalist at this year’s Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and earned him a spot at the 2006 Kennedy Center Summer Playwrights Intensive in Washington, D.C. Ginsberg is currently professional in residence at the Ithaca College Los Angeles program and has taught screenwriting and served as a guest lecturer at such schools as University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and National University. He began his writing career as a reporter and film critic for Daily Variety and also worked in film marketing and publicity for such directors as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, and Lawrence Kasdan.
Steve Gordon served as executive vice president of creative affairs for Viacom Productions in television program development and production over a 20-year period. Under his aegis, nearly 2,000 hours of programming were produced, including several successful series: Ed for NBC; The Chris Isaak Show for Showtime; Emmy-nominated The 4400 for USA Network, which was the most-watched series premiere on basic cable; and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the most successful series in the company’s history. Currently Gordon does graduate work in the Park School where he consults on the Imagination Awards, a national competition; teaches television and radio writing at SUNY Cortland; produces the National College Television Awards for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and in his spare time, runs his own consulting website, Hollywood Creative Connection.
Vincent Grenier (FLEFF distinguished experimental artist) was born in Québec City, Canada, and has lived and worked for the last 30 years in the United States. He was a frequent contributor to the Montréal art scene of the 70s and 80s, as well as the San Francisco Bay area as an experimental film and video maker. Grenier’s films have been shown in the United States, Canada, and Europe at showcases such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema, and Cinéma Parallel in Montréal. He has made over two dozen films and videos, all of which have won numerous international and national awards and critical recognition. Seven of his films and videos were curated in the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970–2000 American Century Film program. Films by Grenier are included in the Donnell Media Library in New York City; the National Film Archive, Ottawa; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; AGO, Toronto; and at many other institutions in Canada and the United States. Grenier teaches in the cinema department at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Slawomir Grunberg (Central New York Filmmakers Showcase) was born in Lublin, Poland, and is a graduate of the Polish Film School in Lodz, where he studied cinematography and directing. He immigrated to the United States in 1981 and has since shot and produced over 40 television documentaries, including Legacy of Jedwabne, Borderline, Fenceline: A Company Town Divided, From Chechnya to Chernobyl, The Warsaw Ghetto, and School Prayer: A Community at War. Grunberg has also been a contributing director of photography and editor for many PBS series, including Frontline, American Masters, Nova, AIDS Quarterly, and People’s Century, as well as for HBO and Lifetime’s Intimate Portraits. A recipient of Guggenheim, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Soros Justice Media Fellowships, Grunberg has also received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000 he won an Emmy Award for his self-directed and coproduced documentary School Prayer: A Community at War.
Roger Hallas is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and visual studies. He is coeditor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, forthcoming 2007) and is currently completing a book, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness and the Queer Moving Image for Duke University Press.
Paul Hamill is a writer and poet. His poetry publications include a chapbook, Winter Mind (2003), a book, The Year of Blue Snow: Northern Poems (2001), several other chapbooks and pamphlets, and many poems in journals. A graduate of Boston College and Stanford, he lives in Ithaca and works as an administrator at Ithaca College. He is the current poet laureate of Tompkins County.
Cynthia Henderson is an assistant professor with Ithaca College’s Department of Theatre Arts. A professional performer for a number of years in the United States, Europe, and Africa, her Ithaca credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hangar Theatre, Lily in Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Callie in Stop Kiss at the Kitchen Theatre. Her New York City credits include A Wrinkle in Time at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and Dorothy Dandridge: An Evening of Song and Remembrance, Brother’s Keeper, and It’s Only a Play off Broadway. Her European credits include leading roles in Dreamgirls, Into the Woods, Children of a Lesser God, and Little Shop of Horrors. Henderson was acknowledged by the European Tournament of Plays with a best supporting actress in a musical award for her role in Little Shop of Horrors. African credits include Charlayne in Pretty Fire and a production of For Colored Girls, which she directed. Television credits include a starring role in UPN’s Ghost Stories, as well as numerous commercial and industrial credits. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright award.
Ishrat Hoque is a dancer. Her dance education began at the Bangladesh Academy of Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was exposed to various forms of dance styles of the South Asian region including Odissi, Manipuri, and traditional dances of the hill regions. In the United States, she has trained with Guru Selvi Chandranathan (Bharatnatyam), and Pandit Satya Narayan Charka (Kathak), and attended workshops with renowned Kathak dancers Pandit Birju Maharaj. Currently she is teaching at New York’s Lotus Music and Dance Studio. Her dance style is a unique fusion incorporating her diverse background in South Asian dance forms.
Dale Hudson received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004, taught cinema studies at Ithaca College and Syracuse University from 2004 to 2006, and is currently a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College. His research examines cinema and new media in relation to racialization, nationalism, immigration, and globalization, particularly within the contexts of the United States, France, and India. He has published articles in Refractory (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Screen (University of Glasgow, Scotland), as well as reviews of new media scholarship and digital archives in Afterimage. In spring 2006, he served on the faculty steering committee for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF). With Lisa Patti, he cocurated a preview event for FLEFF 2006 in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Northeast Historic Film, and the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.
Judy Hyman (FLEFF distinguished composer in residence) has roots in classical training, traditional fiddle music, and modern rock. She is a founding member of the alternative rock band the Horse Flies. She has toured extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and recorded seven albums with the Horse Flies, including releases on MCA and Rounder Records. The Horse Flies have been featured on MTV, Prairie Home Companion, All Things Considered, World Cafe and Mountain Stage and have been written about in Rolling Stone, Musician, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Hyman composes music for film, television, and multimedia. In May 2006 she was nominated for an Emmy by the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the musical composition/arrangement special achievement category. She has also scored two interactive DVDs for the National Library of Medicine titled Dream Anatomy and Changing the Face of Medicine. With Jeff Claus, she has scored two feature films (The Year That Trembled and Disappearances) and a video that will run at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. With the Horse Flies she played a leading role in composing the music for two feature film scores (Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom). She has toured with pop singer Natalie Merchant. She currently performs with Boy with a Fish, the Horse Flies, and several fiddle music bands.
Meg Jamieson is a filmmaker on the faculty of Ithaca College’s Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts. She has a background in writing, theater, and studio arts and completed her master’s and M.F.A. degrees at the University of Iowa. Her works are primarily in the area of nonfiction.
Ernesto Livon-Grosman, who was born in Argentina, lives in the United States where he teaches film and literature at Boston College. He is the director of Cartoneros, a feature-length documentary, which portrays the process of informal recycling in his native Buenos Aires. The documentary explores the connections between the recurrent social and political crisis, economic disintegration, and globalization that have affected Argentina during the last 50 years. He is now working on a series of short documentaries on the history of South American visual poetry.
Tim McCaskell (FLEFF distinguished activist in residence) is a veteran of equity activism in his home city of Toronto. A writer, educator, and activist, he served in the Toronto District School Board Equity Department as a student program worker from 1983 to 2001, where he was instrumental in developing, coordinating, and facilitating antiracist and equity programming for Toronto area schools and their constituents. He is a founding member of AIDS Action Now and is a major figure in international AIDS activism. Most recently, he is the author of Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality, a detailed view of the experiments, successes, and mistakes in the Toronto board of education’s quest to provide truly equitable education for a diverse student body. For almost three decades McCaskell and his colleagues fought to deliver antiracism, antisexism, and antihomophobia education. McCaskell’s astute blend of personal reflection and political theory illuminates a time of significant social struggle, cultural transformation, and deep learning.
Ulises Mejias* is an educator and technocultural theorist whose research interests include networked sociality, the philosophy of technology, and learning design. He is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University. His dissertation explores the redefinition of social relevancy by digital media and considers the limits of the network as a metaphor and model for organizing social realities. Previously, he was director of learning systems design at eCornell, a subsidiary of Cornell University. Mejias has published in various journals including First Monday, Innovate, Knowledge Tree, and Critical Issues in Media Communications, and has been nominated two years consecutively for an EduBlog award. He blogs at ideant.typepad.com.
Jonathan Miller returned to the United States in 2001 after working for 13 years as a journalist, writer, and editor in Southeast Asia and South America. He has produced hundreds of features and news reports for NPR, BBC, CBC, Marketplace, Weekend America, Monitor Radio, Voice of America, Radio Netherlands, Radio New Zealand, and Radio Deutsche Welle, and has written for the New Yorker, Life, Condé Nast Traveler, Parents, American Way, Christian Science Monitor, Far Eastern Economic Review, and many other publications. He has also served as a consulting writer and editor for several development institutions, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the U.N., Oxfam America, the International Rice Research Institute, the Nairobi-based Centre for Research in Agroforestry, the International Potato Center, and the Asian Development Bank. He cofounded and directed Our Place, a full-service daycare program for children of families living in homeless shelters in Seattle. Executive producer for Homelands Productions’ award-winning Worlds of Difference project (2002–2005), he was also editorial director of Think Global, the 2005 National Public Radio collaboration involving more than 300 stations and 30 national shows. He is currently executive producer of the World@Work series, and an affiliated scholar at the Polson Institute for Global Development at Cornell University.
Sarah Mkhonza (Ithaca City of Asylum writer in residence) is a writer, journalist, scholar, and activist from Swaziland. She was a professor at the University of Swaziland. In 2003 she managed to make her way to the United States with her two sons. Granted asylum in 2005, she taught at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, before coming to Cornell this August as a visiting scholar in Africana studies and English, and as a writer in residence for two years with Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA). Affiliated with Cornell’s Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy, ICOA provides sanctuary to writers in exile whose works have been suppressed. Mkhonza, who earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1996, will teach Zulu at the Africana Studies and Research Center this semester—the first time the language has been offered since the early 1990s. The author of two novels for young adults, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, Mkhonza is the recipient of a 2002 Hammett-Hellman Award from Human Rights Watch and a Novib/PEN Emergency Fund grant.
Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media artist. He founded Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org), which looks at post-9/11 security panic. Project excerpts have shown widely, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial. His film on Hawthorne effect and political Islam, Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie, was screened at the British House of Lords. The Young Man Was No Longer a Terrorist, an excerpt from a project on guerilla movements, premiered at Dictionary of War in Munich. His essays include “Terrorists or Guerillas in the Mist?” “Invisible Migrants,” “Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop,” and “Why Mahmud Can’t Be a Pilot.” He is currently cocurating System Error: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning at the Palazzo Papesse Museum in Siena.
Marion Nestle (Health promotion distinguished scholar in residence) is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1986 to 1988, she was senior nutrition policy adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. She has been a member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee and Science Board, the USDA/DHHS 1995 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and American Cancer Society committees that issue dietary guidelines for cancer prevention. She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002) and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (2003). In 2003, Food Politics won awards from the Association for American Publishers, James Beard Foundation, and World Hunger Year. Safe Food won the Steinhardt School of Education’s Griffiths Research Award in 2004. Her latest book, What to Eat, was published in May 2006.
Lisa Patti (is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell and a lecturer in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College. Her current research focuses on language and visuality in Hollywood and European cinemas, with a particular focus on the political economies of international coproductions.
Claudia Pederson is a third-year graduate student at the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She has a master’s degree in the history of art from Long Beach State, California. Her thesis is on tactical media activism. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the intersections between simulation technologies, the military, entertainment, and medicine, specifically addressing their convergence in experimental game design.
Giovanna Pollarolo is an internationally acclaimed screenwriter, novelist, poet, and journalist from Tacna, Peru. As a screenwriter for the acclaimed Peruvian film director Francisco Lombardi, she has written narrative screenplays for feature films such as La Boca del Lobo, Caidos del Cielo, Pantaleon y las Visitadoras, Tinta Roja, and others. She also writes for the premier newspaper of Lima and has a book of short stories Atado de Nervios. Her poetry books include Huerto de Olivos (1987), Entre Mujeres Solas (1991, 1996), La Ceremonia del Adios (1997). She is a professor at the Universidad del Pacifico. A major force in Latin America cinema and literature, her screen credits are impressive and highly acclaimed by critics and major film festival directors in Latin America, North America, and Europe.
Peter Rothbart* is a professor of music theory, history, and composition, and director of electroacoustic and recording studies at the Ithaca College School of Music. He is active as a composer, performer, writer, and artist, with performances and art shows throughout the United States, Europe, and Russia. He has published over 300 articles and is currently working on two books about film music. His music is published by Seesaw Press, Lorenzo Music, and the International Trumpet Guild.
Leah Shafer writes and teaches about film and theater. She has taught courses on subjects ranging from surrealism to Arnold Schwarzenegger. A blurb writer at heart, she has contributed to reference works on theater and American history, and for more than 10 years was senior writer of the Cornell Cinema Flicksheet. She is currently completing a dissertation on underpants, cars, and cake in the 80s films of John Hughes. An active videographer and theater practitioner, she recently assistant directed Beat Box Bard, an original piece that remixes Shakespeare text with beat-boxing and break-dancing. A longtime resident of the Ithaca area, she has been an instructor at both Ithaca College and Cornell University. She lives with her husband in Trumansburg, New York.
Brooke Singer is a locative media artist whose work with the Preemptive Media Collective has been exhibited and performed internationally. She works with ubiquitous computing technologies and interfaces such as RFID, air-monitor controls, scanners, cell phones, and other mobile media to investigate the ways in which power relations are now imbedded within hidden architectures. She and the Preemptive Media Collective were recently awarded the prestigious Eyebeam Fellowship to produce a series of interactive and performative works on air-quality monitoring. Singer’s work explores and blurs the borders between science, technology, politics, and arts practices.
Sharon Lin Tay is cocurator with Dale Hudson of the FLEFF online digital art exhibition, Undisclosed Recipients. She is a lecturer in film studies at Middlesex University in London, England, where she teaches film theory, world cinema, and digital culture. Born in Singapore, she was educated in Singapore, New Zealand, and England, and received her Ph.D. in film studies from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. Her work is sustained by a commitment to feminist politics and revolves around film theory, the specificities of filmic materiality, and filmmaking practices. She has published journal articles and book chapters on feminist film theory, Deleuze, world cinema, and women filmmakers, and writes for various film and media publications. She is currently working on projects about digital cinemas and the contemporary political documentary.
Craig Volk received his M.F.A. in playwriting/screenwriting from the Yale School of Drama. He spent the 90s in Los Angeles writing episodic TV on six writing staffs, including the Emmy-winning Northern Exposure. Volk has written six network pilots and scripted 25 hours of produced TV. As a playwright, his work has been produced at the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Actors Theater of Louisville, Yale Rep, and he was selected three times to participate at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Currently, Volk is head of dramatic writing at the University of Colorado at Denver/Colorado Film School and serves as executive consultant for the Colorado-based television series {noise : floor}, which he developed with Issac Slade of the Fray.
Chris White* is a classical, jazz, and improvisational cellist and cello teacher based in Ithaca, New York. He has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Europe, and North Africa. He has several solo recordings and has played on numerous recordings of other artists. He has a jazz book and CD series for string instruments called Jazz Cello, Jazz Viola, and Jazz Violin and has authored articles in national string and jazz magazines. His most recent CD release is called First Principles, which features his original compositions as well as originals by the pianist Eric Hangen. He performed with his jazz quartet at the First World Cello Congress (1988), the Quanzaine de Montreal (1992), the International New Directions Cello Association and Festival (1995, 1997, and 2001) and at the sixth American Cello Congress in Maryland (2001). He also performs regularly as a classical cellist with the Binghamton (New York) Symphony and frequently freelances with chamber and jazz groups. White is on the faculty of the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca, and he gives workshops on improvisation for cellists. White is the founder and director of the International New Directions Cello Association and Festival, now in its 13th year. He is a graduate of the Ithaca College School of Music.
Craig Volk received his M.F.A. in playwriting/screenwriting from the Yale School of Drama. He spent the 90s in Los Angeles writing episodic TV on six writing staffs, including the Emmy-winning Northern Exposure. Volk has written six network pilots and scripted 25 hours of produced TV. As a playwright, his work has been produced at the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Actors Theater of Louisville, Yale Rep, and he was selected three times to participate at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Currently, Volk is head of dramatic writing at the University of Colorado at Denver/Colorado Film School and serves as executive consultant for the Colorado-based television series {noise : floor}, which he developed with Issac Slade of the Fray.
Phil Wilde and Ann Michel (FLEFF distinguished multimedia producers in residence) have produced award-winning film, video, interactive, and digital media for three decades. They are the principals of Insights International, a production firm that specializes in science and educational nonfiction media for international clients. Their groundbreaking use of media has been widely recognized for bringing the real world into the classroom and the classroom into the real world. They have produced media for major museums, educational institutions, and organizations, professional and scientific associations, and corporations. Most recently they were awarded the blue ribbon for educational aids competition from the American Society of Agricultural Engineers. Michel and Wilde serve as technical consultants for the Light in Winter Festival, an annual festival in Ithaca that links science and the arts. They have been involved with the Robert Flaherty Film Seminars for over two decades.
* Ithaca College alumni
