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“Why can’t I play the piano like I can breathe?”
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser |
Meredith A. Bak received her BA in Media Arts from Brigham Young University in 2004 and her MA in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2006. She has received funding to research Icelandic cinema and has developed projects for interactive children’s theater and children’s television. For the past two years, she co-headed the Education department at Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Her interests include Nordic national cinemas, pedagogical practices, new media, graffiti, museums, and archiving and collecting practices. |
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“You don’t see me as I see myself.
But you’re very good, what you do see me as.”
Little Edie, Grey Gardens,
on filmmakers David and Albert Maysles, 1975 |
Ryan’s primary academic concerns exist at the intersections between film theory and practice, academia and activism, performance and representation, art and social action. Having received her BA from the University of Southern California in 2004 in Cinema-Television and Creative Writing, Ryan continued on to the University of York in England where she completed her MA in Modern Literature and Culture in 2005. After returning to
the States, Ryan worked for Interloper Films, a Los Angeles-based
independent documentary production company. Documentary and ethnographic film continue to spark her interest, as well as viewing all film and media through the lenses of feminism, globalism and social consciousness.
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"I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images that I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember?" - Chris Marker |
Hye Jean received her BA in French Education and English Literature at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. After graduation, she went on to work as a reporter at an English-language daily newspaper, The Korea Times. She earned her MA in 2005 from the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media at UCLA. Her main interests are historicization of memory, intersections of race and gender in media representations, questions of performativity and subjectivity, various manifestations of voice in cinema, and the triangular relationship between filmmaker, subject and spectator in documentary films. Recently she has become intrigued by the ways in which the multiple layering of temporality and spatiality can expand the cinematic realm. |
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Office Hours: Thursday 4-6 pm- Ellison 1817
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Chris Dzialo is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Film & Media Studies, and the Jonathan and Nicholas Lafferty Fellow for 2008-2009. His current research attempts to interrogate the possibilities and limits of contemporary film and media theory, which he strives to continually put into practice through close readings of cultural texts, contexts and objects. To this end Chris has written several close analyses of film and television programs. "When Balance Goes Bad: How Battlestar Galactica Says Everything and Nothing," was recently published in a Continuum Press anthology titled Cylons in America (winner of the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture). "Frustrated Time: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman" will appear in a forthcoming anthology on complex storytelling from Blackwell. Chris received his Bachelor's degree in Film & Television from Boston University and his Master’s degree in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California.
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One’s “reality,” rather than being fixed and predefined, is a perceptual emergent, becoming increasingly multiplex, as more perspectives are taken, more texts are opened, more friendships are made. - Maxine Greene |
After receiving her B.A. in International Studies and Radio, Television
and Film at Northwestern University, Sarah taught in public schools in
New York City and Chicago. While exploring connections between media
technology and constructivist pedagogy, she completed a MSEd at the
University of Illinois-Chicago in 2007. Some of her research interests
include the reiterations of national and transnational cinema discourse,
the politics of documentary filmmaking, and intersections of media
performance, spatiality and the body. She is also studying global
feminisms and development paradigms in the contexts of Middle Eastern
media and politics. She recently traveled to Turkey to continue her
filmmaking/academic endeavors and will return to Istanbul in 2008 to
continue her work. Something that motivates her engagement in media
production is its collaborative and interdisciplinary aspects, which she
finds lead to a dialogue between and transformation of theoretical
paradigms and critical methods.
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‘science is all metaphor" - Timothy Leary
‘…the crystal ship is being filled…’- The Doors
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Anastasia received her B.F.A in Fine Art Media from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her film and video work focused primarily on narrative structure, deconstruction and re-contextualization of filmic conventions, and reflexivity. She became interested in systems of perceived or accepted information, peripheral scientific theories, and diagrams and illustrations in relation to fallacy, corruption, and arbitrariness within the construction of knowledge. She is currently in her first year of the PhD program and is concentrating on the philosophical and metaphysical undercurrents of narrativity and the relatedness to systems of fact and knowingness. She hopes to continue making work balancing on the crux of theory and practice.
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| “The important thing for me are the refuges, the places people go to hide. They tell me more about the external world, about the elements of fear and danger lurking in
external life than the real external world. I think whatever fears are at work inside people can
be recognized from the places they flee to; how they settle in these places provides
the opportunity for such a recognition.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
Regina received her BA in Anthropology and Film Studies from UC Berkeley and then went on to live and work in Rome, Italy where she was a founding member and set designer for a fledgling theater group. She found her way back to the states and back to school at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and Archival Studies at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. For several years before returning to school to pursue her PhD, Regina worked as a film archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Through her experience in film archiving, Regina became acutely aware of just how much the interpretation, writing and dissemination of history depends on continued access to these primary sources. Her current research interests include theorizing the archive, the use of audio-visual media in early planetariums and science museums, the films of the Marshall Plan and the intersection of Cold War culture and history. |
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"My opinion is that there's no such thing as the so-called "world". People can only see their own lives, and they can only observe life from the standpoint of their own life experiences, so that our impressions of life are really only our impressions of our own life, and our impressions of the world are just our impressions of the environment we live in. At some point I wrote that this thing we call the world is really just a corner of the world; every corner of the world that people live in, like this office we're in right now, might be the whole world." --Jia Zhangke, talking about his film The World
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Joshua is a second-year PhD student in the Film and Media Studies program. His current research interests include Chinese (language) cinema, media events and infrastructure, and spatial culture. At present he is co-organizing the MEDIA FIELDS graduate conference (UCSB/April 6-7), and works as a research assistant for the Transliteracies Project. He is spending 2007-2008 in Beijing, PRC, improving his Chinese and beginning research on a larger project centering on film/television, the 2008 Olympic Games and the changing cultural space of Beijing. |
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Unmasking the source of the subjective experience behind human consciousness is less likely to demonstrate how mental processes can be eliminated from material explanations than to demonstrate how they are implicit in them. And this may help us to recognize that the universe isn't, after all, the soulless, blindly spinning clockwork we fear we are a part of, but is, instead, nascent heart and mind." --Terrence W. Deacon |
Daniel Reynolds is from Portland, Oregon. He received a BA in Linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2001 and an MFA in Film Studies from Boston University in 2004. In the two years before he came to UCSB, he was a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Dan is interested in film and video game aesthetics and issues relating to consciousness and cognition. |
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))<>((“ Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) |
Jeff grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Swarthmore College with High Honors in 2004. He is drawn to thinking and writing about film, cultural, and critical theories, and their languages and histories; independent filmmaking; and American culture. Papers he has written recently have explored cultural parentheticality, the pursuit of framelessness in film theories, case studies of the laugh track, and Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World. Jeff has worked as an editorial assistant for the journal Camera Obscura since 2005. This past year, he co-organized Media Fields (a graduate student conference), received his MA, and taught 192B: Contemporary Theory. Currently, Jeff is teaching a class on film programming and writing a paper about YouTube, Internet comedy, and post-Katrina representations of race.
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Pauline received her B.A. in Art History from Smith College, in Northampton, MA. She minored in Film Studies and went on to work in video production and post-production. In 2005, she joined the first class of the Ph.D. program in Film and Media Studies. She is interested in the historiography of media technology collections and archives, preservation, and digital formats. |
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Nicole Starosielski is working on a dissertation project on media technologies and representations of underwater spaces. She is interested in undersea cables, underwater technologies of vision, popular and scientific representations of underwater spaces, underwater animation, and immersive environments. She has worked for and been affiliated with the Transliteracies project, the Carsey-Wolf for Film, TV, and New Media's Environmental Media Initiative, and the Center for Information, Technology and Society. She has also had experience in media production and recently created the GreenScreen environmental media production program. She received her BA in Cinema-Television and English from the University of Southern California in 2005.
website: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~n_star/
blog/archive: http://underwatermedia.wordpress.com/
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"This is my project: to film with one hand my other hand.
To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary.
I feel as if I am an animal, what's worse, I am an animal I don't know."
--Agnes Varda in The Gleaners and I |
Athena received her BA in Growth and Structure of Cities with a minor in Film Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2006. She is interested in film and media geographies, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and Philippine cultural studies. She has conducted fieldwork in Manila, Philippines and Santiago, Chile on cinema consumption and film culture. |
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"You'll find many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own points of view" -Obi Wan Kenobi |
Ethan has been studying media since 2001. He received his BA in Media Arts
from the University of Arizona in 2005 and his MA in Cinema and Media
Studies from UCLA in 2007. He has done sports video work for ESPN and UCLA
Athletics. Currently Ethan is working toward his PhD in Film and Media
Studies. His scholarship primarily focuses on Hollywood's relationship to a
digitally empowered public. He is particularly interested in the ways that
niche communities interact, interpret and re-imagine mass media texts. |
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"'With a camera like that,' Friedlander has said of the Leica, 'you
don't believe that you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to
be able to peck at the world.'"
-Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
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After receiving her BA in Film Studies from Yale in 2004, Lauren
helped program screenings and wrote about films for the Museum of
Television & Radio, the IFP Market, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the
RiverRun International Film Festival. Originally from North Carolina,
her interests run to documentaries, photography, shiny cars driving
through landscapes, and postwar American culture, with the occasional
lapse into evolutionary biology or vocal warblings. She is a producer
with the GreenScreen environmental media production group for 2007.
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"Quote me as saying I was misquoted" -Marx (not Karl but Groucho)
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." -G. Marx
"It is a sad and beautiful world." -Roberto Benigni
"Yeah, it's a sad and beautiful world, buddy." Tom Waits, Down By Law (Jarmusch,1986) |
Noah received his BA in literature (with a focus on Brit lit) from UC Santa Cruz in 2002. He went on to work in East Los Angeles as an AmeriCorps VISTA. Subsequently, he attended UCLA's Moving Image Archive Studies program, where he received an MA in 2006. Noah's experience in that program made him want to try and move the archival world and the community of film and media studies closer together. His research interests include American cinema and politics, Latin American archives, Spanish-language television, new media and resistance, and the Pentagon's involvement in Hollywood and U.S. television. |
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