Faculty Steering Committee

Documentary Studies and Production Steering Committee Members

The members of the Steering Committee feature a diversity of research areas and production expertise, and all have international perspectives and backgrounds.

John D. Scott is an associate professor of media arts and the director of the documentary studies and production degree at Ithaca College. His films have won multiple awards and glowing reviews in the US and Canada. He has directed many short films that have played internationally in over twenty countries as well as two critically acclaimed feature-length documentaries, Scouts Are Cancelled, and Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing. His films create intersections between fiction and documentary approaches to filmmaking.

Prior to joining academia, he worked as an independent producer and editor. He served as a field producer at Street Cents a Gemini Award winning show at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He earned a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University, a BA in Honours English form Dalhousie University and an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa.

Scott teaches documentary production, fiction production, video essay, and editing courses. Scott grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada and identifies as a Maritimer.

Brad Rappa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. With a background in painting, photography, documentary, and experimental media, he is an award-winning filmmaker.

Shot in Iceland, Mongolia, and the United States, Rappa’s three most recent films, Losing Ground (2015), Fall (2016), Anthropocene (2017), address climate change from global and local perspectives to investigate global consumer culture and the challenges of living in harmony with the natural environment.

His films have screened internationally at festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Tel Aviv International Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. His films were awarded Best of Fest at the Arizona International Film Festival, and Best Minnesota Made Documentary at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. His films have also received funding from the New York State Council for the Arts.

He is currently working on the final film in a three-part series entitled Mindful Hypocrisy, a playful commentary on the economic, environmental, and social costs of destructive behaviors that contribute to our rapidly diminishing biosphere .

Maria Mejia Yepes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies at Ithaca College, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Minor in Audio Production.

In addition to her career in academia, she is a freelance sound artist. Her work has screened at prominent international film festivals and award events such as the Emmys, Camden International Film Festival, Oaxaca Film Festival, Global India International Film Festival, and the Bucharest Film Festival. Her work has also been broadcast on major television networks such as CBS, ESPN, PBS and Telemundo.

Her interest in bringing light to underrepresented communities and their contributions to society has led her to work on the productions of Stari Grad (2018), Brick by Brick (2019), Voices from the Barrens (2019), With infinite Hope: MLK and the Civil Rights Movement (2018), Iroquois Creation Story (2015), Fair Haven (2014), An Ambulance Made of Whiskey (2014) among others.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar with Scott MacDonald (Indiana, 2021); Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (Indiana, 2019); Open Space Collaborative New Media: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, with Helen De Michiel (Routledge Press, 2018); The Flaherty: Fifty Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema, with Scott MacDonald ( Indiana University Press, 2017); Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds in International Public Media ( University of St. Andrews Press, 2016); Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Local Place with Dale Hudson (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana University Press, 1995). She is coeditor with Karen Ishizuka of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories (University of California Press, 2007). With Louis Massiah from Scribe Video Center, she coprogrammed the national touring exhibition, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media.