Films and Filmmakers Spring 2018

J-Walt is a director, interactive designer, filmmaker, performer, graphic artist, music composer, and VR pioneer. For three decades, he has been at the forefront of interactive art and computer performance, expanding the uses of computer animation into uncharted territories. His “Lucid Dreamscapes” performances combine aspects of animation, video games, music, theater, dance and architecture into a seamless new art form. He has performed for thrilled audiences around the US as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America.

MICHAEL HAUSMAN is a Unit Production Manager, Assistant Director, and Producer of feature films and movies for television. Beginning his career in business working at Merrill Lynch, Hausman developed an interest in art and decided to become a painter and photographer. After working with photographer Paul Caponigro, Hausman found a job at DuArt Film & Video where he produced four documentaries about painting, sparking an interest in filmmaking.

ISABEL SANDOVAL is a New York-based Filipino filmmaker. She has produced, written and directed two full-length features, including the Filipino-language Señorita (2011), which premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and was nominated for Best Picture by the Young Critics Circle of the Philippines. Señorita also won her the Emerging Director Award at the 2012 Asian-American International Film Festival.

Co-moderated by Lise Raven

Co-sponsored by the Office of Equity and Diversity

 

Zeva Oelbaum is an award winning producer and photographer. She recently produced Ahead of Time, a feature length documentary about centenarian journalist Ruth Gruber which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before garnering six Best Documentary awards. The film opened theatrically across the U.S. and was broadcast on Showtime Channel.

Oelbaum was also executive producer of the feature documentary, Rene and I. She comes to film from a career as a still photographer and her work has been extensively published in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine.

SARITA KHURANA’s feature film, A Suitable Girl, world premiered in the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival Documentary Competition section, and won the Best New Documentary Director prize. Her critically acclaimed work in narrative, documentary and experimental film has been screened and exhibited internationally. Her work often focuses on South Asian stories, and explores female subjectivities. Migration, memory, marginality, community, territory, gender and sexuality are common themes in her work.

Chris Janney

producer of “The Other F Word” (available on Amazon)

BRI CASTELLINI

community/social media manager at Stareable, a webseries community/aggregator and a director of several series of her own.

ARTHUR VINCIE

writer/producer/director of “Three Trembling Cities” (found on numerous platforms)

BEN WOLF

DP on a number of digital series including  “Three Trembling Cities” and “The Other F Word”

Pat O’Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960’s. A founding father of the city’s avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the early 1960’s onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques.

Robin Kampf is an award-winning writer, producer, director, cinematographer and editor with several years of experience in non-fiction documentary and news/features production.

Robin began her career in TV production working in local news and features while managing a team of producers for a local TV station. She has also worked in locations and management on several feature films including “Presumed Innocent”, “Bonfire of the Vanities”, “Jacobs Ladder”, among others.

JAN OXENEBERG started her career as an independent filmmaker whose early lesbian themed short films have been shown around the world and were selected for preservation by the National Film Archive of Britain and the Academy of Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles. They are still in distribution. Her feature film THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT a hybrid of documentary and narrative, tied for the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Gay Film Festival and was distributed theatrically and shown at festivals all over the world.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Equity and Diversity

George Griffin grew up in Tennessee, studied political science at Dartmouth, and has lived in New York City since 1967. He apprenticed in commercial cartoon studios, drew cartoons for East Village Other and Raw and was influenced by Robert Breer, Saul Steinberg, and Stan Vanderbeek. He has made over 30 short films, work that is essentially experimental and personal, including self-referential cartoons, narratives, documentaries and musicals (Head, Viewmaster, Ko-Ko, A Little Routine). He has published flipbooks and Frames, a selection of independent animators work, and taught at Harvard, Pratt, and Parsons. Griffin line-produced the Emmy-winning “L’Histoire du Soldat” for PBS and directed TV commercials for Colossal Pictures.

KATHY ROSE’s work has evolved from her early drawn animated films of the 1970’s,  through her unique, pioneering performance work combining dance with film in the 1980-90’s, to her current surreal performance video spectacles and installations, with influence from symbolist art and the Japanese Noh theater.
Rose received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Performance Art in 2003, and in 2005 was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts grant in Video (Media & New Technology).

Dorit Naaman, director and producer

Dorit is a documentarist and film theorist born and raised in Jerusalem. She teaches film and media at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, and splits her time between Canada and Jerusalem. Dorit developed a format of short personal documentaries, which she called DiaDocuMEntaRy. She has published on Israeli and to a lesser extent Palestinian cinema, focusing on gender, nationalism and militarism. She initiated Jerusalem, We Are Here as a collaborative platform that can map and tell the stories of a Jerusalem that is no longer visible.

Livia Alexander, co-producer

Livia Alexander is a New York based curator, writer and Chairperson of the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Alexander has curated and produced visual arts and film exhibitions at a wide variety of institutions, including the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Maraya Arts Centre, among others. She is a regular consultant to a variety of art organizations and galleries and is the co-founder of ArteEast, a leading international non-profit organization promoting Middle Eastern art. Her writings have appeared at Hyperallergic, Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia, Journal of Visual Anthropology, Framework and as part of edited volumes on film and art.