Northwestern University
Department of Radio/Television/Film
Fall 2018
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On September 12,
Professor Jacob Smith
gave the keynote talk at the seminar
“
The Sound of the Anthropocene” at IRCAM in Paris.
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Netflix has given a green light to a new animated series entitled
The Liberator,
created, written, and executive produced by Visiting Assistant Professor
Jeb Stuart
.
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Meredith Zielke
will continue at Northwestern with her filmmaking partner Yoni Goldstein as part of the Kaplan Institute residency.
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"An Attempt to Heal in the Contemporary World"
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Co-Director of the MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage/Prof.
Dave Tolchinsky’s
An Attempt to Heal in the Contemporary World
ran from Oct 16-28, at the HB Studio Playwrights Theatre in New York City, receiving an excellent review from
Theatre Is Easy
, as well as coverage in
Broadway World
,
Broadway World
(an earlier article),
The Daily Northwestern
, and
Splash Magazine
. The day before the play opened, on October 15,
Creature Companion,
a film that Tolchinsky produced, which is directed and also produced by former RTVF faculty member
Melika Bass
, had its Chicago premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival as part of an evening of
experimental shorts
. Creature Companion will play at the
Human Rights Film Festival
in Zagreb, Croatia, Dec 2-9.
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Adjunct faculty
Sarah Geis
won the Documentary Audio Recognition Award from London-based The Whickers for her piece
The Art of Now: Guantanamo
.
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Lecturer
Chaz Evans
received
a MacArthur grant
to create a VR project with collaborators. The project is called
Citizen Journalism VR
.
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MFA Documentary program alumni co-directors
Shuhan Fan
(Class of 2016) and
Luther Clement
(Class of 2017), plus producers
Ashley Brandon
(Class of 2017) and
Nevo Shinaar
(Class of 2017) are going to the
Sundance Film Festival
this year with their competition short documentary
Stay Close
. The music was composed by RTVF Sound Arts and Industries MA graduate
Xiameng Summer Lin
(Class of 2017).
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Sebastián Pinzón Silva
(MFA Doc Media '17) has made
Filmmaker Magazine
’s yearly
25 New Faces of Independent Cinema
list. He also gave a big shout out to Northwestern and his faculty mentor
J.P. Sniadecki.
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Iyabo Kwayana
's (
MFA Doc Media '17)
thesis film
Practice
has been accepted at
Visions du Réel, AFI Docs, Chicago Underground Film Festival, AricaDocs (Chile), Camden International Film Festival, Tacoma Film Festival, schnit Worldwide Short Film Festival, San Diego Asian Film Festival (2019), and the London Short Film Festival.
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Pam Austin
(MFA Doc Media '18) and her thesis film WHIMPER premiered at the
Chicago International Film Festival
.
After completing the MFA program in June, Austin is now working on a project about the last run of the Greyhound bus in Canada.
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In November, filmmaker
Assia Boundaoui
conducted a master class with the MFA Doc Media students and screened her acclaimed film
THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED
at Block Cinema. Alumna
Shuling Yong
(pictured) was the Director of Photography.
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Matthew Test
(MA Sound Arts and Industries '18) has a residency with Chicago’s Links Hall for his work “Flukes: An Installation Opera”. “Flukes” is a multidisciplinary opera and gallery Installation about whales, perspective, to-do lists, skeletal compression, decision-making and opera itself.
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The Undergraduate Radio/Television/Film Student Association
has selected its 2018-2019 class representatives:
Class of 2019:
Chloe Fourte
and
Jack Schimmel
Class of 2020:
Andrew McCabe
and
Rachel Fimbianti
Class of 2021:
Sam Hasset
and
Billy Loveman
Class of 2022:
Maggie Brill
and
Owen Pickette
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The Blackout
had their quarterly live show on Sunday, December 2nd, at 8pm, the first show with this year’s host,
Diego Abraham
. The Blackout’s live shows contain Northwestern-centric monologues and sketches, performances by student bands and dance groups, and interviews with students, organizations, and administrators. This marks the start of the show’s 4th year, and featured exciting guests, including Justin Barbin, Northwestern Bhangra, Free Planet, and more!
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The 48-hour First Year Filmmakers weekend (pictured) took place over the weekend of October 19-21, organized by Senior Lecturer
Erik Gernand
.
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MAs in Sound Arts & Industries
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Seven-time Academy Award winner
Gary Rydstrom
returned to Sound Arts and Industries to give a guest lecture November 8. At 7pm that evening he introduced a screening of
Rear Window
at Block Museum in an event open to the public.
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Sarah Espinoza
(Class of 2019) won an Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago award for Outstanding Sound Design for “The Displaced” at Haven Theatre.
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Trimpin
gave an artist talk on October 11. The night before, Trimpin answered student questions at the end of the on-campus screening of
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention
, which is a 2009 documentary profiling him.
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Brendan Baker
gave an artist talk on October 8. Baker is the director for Marvel’s podcast series
Wolverine: The Long Night
and was previously the producer for the critically acclaimed podcast Love + Radio.
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MFAs in Documentary Media
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Director
PJ Rava
screened his doc
CALL HER GANDA
at Block Cinema. The screening was a co-presentation by Doc Media, the National Alliance of Women and Julian Glover from NU’s Gender & Sexuality Studies program.
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This fall, MFA in Doc Media and NU’s Block Museum have partnered for another installment of the New Doc series. In October, the critically acclaimed documentary
MINDING THE GAP
by filmmaker
Bing Liu
played to a packed audience. Liu met with the MFA Doc Media students for a masterclass and for one-on-ones to discuss their own film projects.
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Milton Guillen
(MFA '20) took part in the North Star Residency at the Camden International Film Festival.
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Jennifer Boles
(MFA '19) screened her film
HALL OF FISHES
at this year's Great Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Marquette University.
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In August,
ON THE RINK
, by
Benjamin Buxton
(MFA '19) screened along with 7 other films as part of the Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 4 series.
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MFAs in Writing for the Screen & Stage
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Short plays by
B.J Tindal
(MFA '18),
Priyankar Patra
(MFA '18),
Dolores Diaz
(MFA '19), and
Aalisha Sheth
(MFA '19) were staged at the
New World Play Festival
from Oct 11-27, produced by Nothing Without A Company.
Ben Verschoor
's short film "Birthday Wish," written by fellow Class of 2019 cohort member
Aalisha Sheth
and produced with cohort members
Dolores Diaz
and
Exal Iraheta
in Erik Gernand's Graduate Production Workshop was accepted into the 2018 Directors Circle Festival of Shorts. An online festival, it ran from Thursday November 29th through Saturday December 8th.
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Class of 2019 students
Nikkita Duke
and
Aalisha Sheth
co-wrote a web-series pilot which was shortlisted for Round 2 of the
Macro Episodic Lab
(powered by the Black List and in partnership with Emmy Award-winning writer Lena Waithe and Actress/Producer/Director Eva Longoria).
Nikkita Duke
's radio play "The Forbidden Room" was longlisted for Paris's Little Wonder 2018 Writing Competition and will be performed on December 3rd as part of Chicago's Wildclaw Theatre's Deathscribe Helleven.
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Dolores Diaz
was a semi-finalist for The Goodman's 2018/2019 Playwrights Unit.
Her full length,
Man of the People
, ran October 20th through November 17th with Three Cat Theater in Chicago.
Her short "Appreciation Day" ran October 11th-13th with Nothing Without a Company in Chicago and MOJOAA in North Carolina the same weekend as part of different festival line ups.
She was recently invited to collaborate with Performing Arts Studio to devise scenes for their Forum Theatre's Fall/Winter season; this work will be seen throughout Chicago for the 2018-2019 season.
Her full length,
Los Tequileros
, will receive a workshop reading with 16th Street Theater during the 2018-2019 season.
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Ashley Smith
received a one year lecturer contract in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith was named the Horror Area Chair for this year’s Film & History conference in Madison, WI. She received and accepted an invitation as a Visiting Guest Speaker at Rider University in New Jersey, that took place in November 2018. She presented a paper titled, “Hillbillies, Yuppies, and Other White Boogeymen: Abjection and Race in American Horror,” and participated in a professionalization/ Q&A workshop with undergraduates studying film at the university.
Evelyn Kreutzer
is working as the Graduate Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Block Museum for the academic year, and she and Esra Cimencioglu are curating the film series "Migrating Berlin"--a collection of films from the time of the German reunification, focusing on issues of demographic migration and spatial transformation-- at the Block Cinema in the winter quarter of 2019.
Carter Moulton
's article on blockbuster movie trailers was recently published in the
International Journal of Cultural Studies
, and his chapter on midnight movies is set to be published in the
Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema
.
Kim Schreiber
co-created a video work as part of the collaborative Hysterical Accuracy that has been included in the exhibition "Being Here With You/Estando Aqui Contigo" at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Whitney Pow
gave a presentation titled “Documented, Documenting: Unearthing transgender subjectivity in the computer operating system,” at the Special Interest Group for Computing, Information and Society (SIGCIS) Stored in Memory Conference at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), St. Louis, MO, October 2018. Pow received the Computer History Museum Travel Award to attend SIGCIS. Pow's presented a presentation titled "Hardware Intimacies: Queer Desire and Coded Input in Sean Wejebe’s The Longest Couch," at the Queerness in Games Conference (QGCon) at Concordia University, Montreal, QC, September 2018. Pow received the Sexualities Project at Northwestern Travel Award for attending QGCon. Pow received the 2018 Queerness in Games Conference Travel Award for attending QGCon. Pow presented and playtested Pow's educational game design work for the STEM-focused board games Destructive Interference, Project Stormfury, and Race to Restore at the 2018 Play Make Learn Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI, August 2018. Pow presented and playtested Pow's educational game design work on the STEM-focused board games Quest for Mars, Recycling Futures, Destructive Interference, Project Stormfury and Race to Restore at JASON's National Educators Conference at The George Washington University in Ashburn, VA, June 2018.
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Department of Radio/Television/Film
Annie May Swift Hall
1920 Campus Drive, 2nd Floor
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-491-7315
Fax: 847-467-2389
rtvfnewsletter@northwestern.edu
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