Faculty

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  • Jonathan Wacks

    Chair and Professor

    Jonathan Wacks has directed a number of films including Powwow Highway, produced by Beatle, George Harrison. This film was winner of the Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker's Trophy, nominated for 4 Independent Spirit Awards, and winner of awards for best picture, director, and actor at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco.  

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  • Tom Kingdon

    Associate Professor

    Mr. Kingdon has been a producer, director (theater and television) and production manager.

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  • Joseph Ketner

    Lois and Henry Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence

    Joseph Ketner has worked as a museum curator and director in both university and public museums, specializing in modern and contemporary art, as well as 19th-century American art, for the past 30 years. As the inaugural Foster Chair, Ketner teaches contemporary art history and curates experimental contemporary art exhibitions in Emerson's Huret and Spector Gallery. Recently, he has presented a new series of exhibitions there, titled The Next Generation, showing the work of the most talented graduate students from New England's art schools.

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  • Claire Andrade-Watkins

    Associate Professor

    Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins is a historian, filmmaker and 2nd generation American of Cape Verdean descent.  Her scholarship focuses on French and Portuguese language African cinema.

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  • Pierre Archambault

    Associate Professor

    Mr. Archambault is a sound designer, sound art and music composer and a performer of electronic music. Among others, his credits include sound design for the award winning, CD-ROM, Exotic Japan, the BBC film Dear Nelson, and contributing composer for the PBS series Our Stories and Made-in-Maine

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  • Miranda Banks

    Assistant Professor

    Dr. Banks' primary area of research is the American film and television industries, with a specific focus on creative and craft guilds and unions. Her current book project is a history of film and television writers and the Writers Guild.

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  • Anya Belkina

    Assistant Professor

    Born in Moscow, Russia, Anya Belkina began her studies of drawing, painting and design at the Moscow Art Institute In Memory of 1905. After relocating to the United States, she worked as a designer for companies such as NTN Communications, Compton's New Media, Pacific Data Products, Litel Instruments and Chicago Tribune.

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  • Harlan Bosmajian

    Assistant Professor

    Harlan Bosmajian has been the director of photography on 30 feature films and several TV series. His career began after shooting the black and white film La Ciudad for which he received a nomination for Best Cinematography at the Independent Spirit Awards and won Best Cinematography at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

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  • Kevin Bright

    Executive Artist-In-Residence

    As one of the three original executive producers behind the highest-rated comedy on television— NBC's Friends—Kevin S. Bright (along with creators and fellow executive producers Marta Kauffman and David Crane) has gained recognition as one of TV's most talented producers. After graduating from Emerson College magna cum laude in 1976, he began his career at the Joseph Cates Company, where he later produced the first six David Copperfield magic specials. He also produced specials starring Johnny Cash, Bill Cosby, and George Burns.

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  • Martie Cook

    Associate Professor

    Professor Cook has more than twenty-five years of experience as a respected writer and producer of television and film.  She has worked for ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS as well as for Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Studios.

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  • Thomas Cooper

    Professor

    Thomas Cooper is the author or co-author of six published books about media ethics and criticism including Media Fast/Fast Media, Television and Ethics: A Bibliography, Communications Ethics and Global Change, and An Ethics Trajectory. The co-publisher of Media Ethics, an independent academic and professional magazine (both on-line and in print), Cooper has written over a hundred articles and reviews.

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  • Kenneth Feil

    Scholar-In-Residence

    Ken Feil is the author of Dying For A Laugh: Disaster Movies and The Camp Imagination (Wesleyan University Press, 2006).

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  • Marc Fields

    Associate Professor

    Marc Fields is a writer/producer/director of arts and cultural documentaries and the winner of five regional Emmys for his work on PBS. In November 2011, his 90-minute music history Give Me the Banjo (narrated by Steve Martin) had its national PBS premiere. Previously, he wrote the scripts for two episodes of the landmark six-part PBS series, Broadway: The American Musical.

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  • Peter Flynn

    Scholar-In-Residence

    Peter Flynn teaches courses in media history, theory and production.

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  • John Craig Freeman

    Associate Professor

    Professor Freeman uses digital technologies to produce exhibitions made up of projected virtual reality environments that lead the user from global satellite perspectives to virtual reality scenes on the ground.

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  • Donald Fry

    Associate Professor

    Dr. Fry's expertise is in mass communication theory, research methods, and media management. He served as Television and Film Head, Department of Speech Communication, Wichita State University, and has taught at West Virginia University, Ohio State University, and Bowling Green State University.

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  • Daniel Gaucher

    Associate Professor

    Daniel Gaucher is an accomplished television editor and documentary producer, who has two decades of experience in the entertainment industry. He has worked in the Boston, New York, and Los Angeles markets for both broadcast and cablecast outlets. With his professional achievements as a director, editor, and producer, Gaucher brings a broad knowledge of all aspects of production to the wide range of projects and institutions with which he works.

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  • John Gianvito

    Associate Professor

    Professor Gianvito is a filmmaker, curator, and critic. His films include the feature films The Flower of Pain, Address Unknown, and The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, winner of multiple awards including being cited as one of the top ten films of the year by critics in The Chicago Reader, The Boston Phoenix, and Film Comment magazine.

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  • Eric Gordon

    Associate Professor

    Eric Gordon's research focuses on location-based media, technology and community, and serious games.

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  • Hassan Ildari

    Assistant Professor

    With eight feature screenplays to his credit, writer-director Hassan Ildari has directed the award-winning feature Face of the Enemy, and the feature Sharkskin, now in post-production. Ildari's screenplay Confessor is currently in development at Belladonna Productions (Funny Games, Transamerica). His screenplay The Seamstress has Academy Award winners Mercedes Ruehl and Olympia Dukakis and Emmy Award winner Peter Coyote attached to play the lead roles. D-Girl, Ildari's latest screenplay, portrays the life of an unemployed movie executive.

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  • Brooke Knight

    Associate Professor

    Professor Knight's interactive artwork is currently centered around surveillance, webcams, and remote control, and the relationship between text and landscape.

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  • Cher Knight

    Associate Professor

    Cher Krause Knight is an art historian focused on modern and contemporary art and architecture. She is also a specialist in museum studies, with an emphasis on curatorial theory.

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  • Cristina Kotz Cornejo

    Associate Professor

    Raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the US, Cristina Kotz Cornejo is an independent filmmaker whose debut feature film, 3 Américas (2007) premiered at the 2007 Woodstock Film Festival.

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  • Diane Lake

    Assistant Professor

    Diane Lake, who previously taught screenwriting for UCLA's acclaimed Writer's Program, has been a working screenwriter since 1993 when she sold her first story idea. Since then, Lake has been commissioned to write screenplays for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, and Paramount, as well as numerous independent producers.

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  • Theodore Life

    Distinguished Director in Residence

    Theodore R. Life Jr. is a Producer/Director for film, television and the theater. He has been awarded a Fulbright Journalist Fellowship, 3 CINE Golden Eagles, named a Sony Innovator and nominated for 3 Emmys. 

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  • James Macak

    Assistant Professor

    Jim worked as an intern for Emmy and Humanitas winner David Milch and went on to write scripts for three of David's shows, including NYPD BLUE.  Jim was also chosen as a Disney Fellow and wrote a produced sitcom pilot for Disney and CBS as well as several TV movies for CBS, FOX and Lifetime.

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  • Maurice Methot

    Associate Professor

    Mr. Methot teaches courses in Audio for New Media, Studio Recording, and Media Production. He is a composer, performer, and media artist whose work is devoted to the exploration of sound both as a physical phenomenon and as a metaphorical device. He has performed extensively in a variety of venues ranging from punk mecca C.B.G.B.'s to the Moscow Conservatory of Music.

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  • Robert Patton-Spruill

    Director-In-Residence

    Robert Patton-Spruill is a Boston-based filmmaker and has directed independent motion pictures such as Squeeze (Miramax, 1997) Body Count (Showtime, 1998), and Welcome to the Terrordome (2007 AFI Film Fest). He has directed music videos for groups such as Public Enemy and television commercials for fashion designer Elie Tahari.

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  • Kathryn Ramey

    Associate Professor and Director of the BFA Program

    Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research.  Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques.

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  • Linda Reisman

    Distinguished Producer-in-Residence

    Linda Reisman is an independent film producer who has also served as an executive and university professor. For several years, she was the head of production for Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope and supervised development, production, and completion of Zoetrope's slate. Reisman served as executive producer on Jeepers Creepers, No Such Thing, Assassination Tango, and Pumpkin for the company.

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  • Jan Roberts-Breslin

    Professor and Graduate Program Director

    Ms. Roberts-Breslin is an independent media artist whose work has been broadcast on PBS and has received national and international festival awards.

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  • Robert Sabal

    Associate Professor

    Professor Sabal is a film and video producer whose works include narrative drama, documentary, abstract experimental, instructional, and commercials.

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  • Eric Schaefer

    Associate Professor and Associate Chair

    Dr. Schaefer is a film and media historian who specializes in exploitation film and other marginalized cinemas. His essays have been published in Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, Film History, and anthologies such as Looking Past the Screen, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, and American Cinema of the 1960s. He is the author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 now in its third printing. 

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  • Michael Selig

    Associate Professor

    Dr. Selig has taught at the University of Vermont, Rosary College, Northwestern University, and the University of Texas.

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  • Jane Shattuc

    Professor

    Dr. Shattuc has taught at the University of Vermont and University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a fellow at Bonn Universität, Bonn, Germany.

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  • Lauren Shaw

    Professor

    Lauren Shaw co-chaired the National Conference: Women in Photography in 1997, and helped formed New England Women in Photography. She is the recipient of two National Endowment Regional Grants, and seven Faculty Advancement Fund Grants. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and in the collection of the Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fogg Museum, High Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, and the Newark Museum.

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  • James Sheldon

    Associate Professor

    Before joining the Emerson faculty in 1996, Mr. Sheldon worked for many years as a museum curator and artist active in the media of photography, video, and interactive art.

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  • Stephen Shipps

    Associate Professor

    Dr. Shipps is an arts educator primarily concerned with the nature and history of "art" as a Western cultural institution, and how best to teach about that.  He has written and spoken widely about those concerns in both national and international forums.

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  • Jean Stawarz

    Associate Professor

    Ms. Stawarz has worked as a screenwriter for film and television, a story editor, and associate producer.  Numerous producers have optioned her work including, Davis Entertainment/Classics, Accent Entertainment and the CBC.

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  • Robert Todd

    Associate Professor

    A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization.

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  • Paul Turano

    Artist-In-Residence

    Paul Turano is an award-wining experimental film and video artist. His work has been exhibited nationally and abroad at museums, micro-cinemas, alternative venues, and at festivals throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. 

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  • Shujen Wang

    Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the School of the Arts

    Author of Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Great China (2003), Dr. Wang's research interests include media globalization, film distribution and piracy, and issues surrounding networks, space, and technology.

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Emerson College students at Cannes Film Festival

Emerson Students Cannes Blog

Emerson students will be chronicling their experiences at the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival. Read about their trip to the most prestigious film festival in the world.

Read the Lions in Cannes Blog »

Visual & Media Arts Assistant Professor Diane Lake has written screenplays for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, Paramount, and many independent producers.

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