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Nate Brennan recently earned his MA from the Cinema Studies Department. His interests include postwar American film, postwar atomic culture and the histories of film audiences and exhibition practices. He comes from Delaware, which is not a commonwealth, but is, in fact, actually a state.
Ms. Dadak is a PhD student, a teaching assistant, and an enigma.*
Paul Fileri is a first-year MA student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU. He earned his B.A. from Columbia University in 2006 with a major in English and Comparative Literature and a minor in French.
Jacob Gaboury is a first year MA student in the NYU Cinema Studies department. With a BA in Spanish language and cultural studies, a thesis in queer media and representation, and a presentation on World of Warcraft and post-human anxiety, Mr. Gaboury could best be described as an esoteric dilettante. He hopes to continue to confuse himself and others through the completion of his MA at NYU.
Jesse Gant will be preparing his thesis, Freemen to the Rescue! The Construction of Civil War Memory in Wisconsin, his home state, during the summer of 2007. He will graduate from NYU’s Draper Program this fall, and would like to expand his thesis research into a dissertation encompassing all the states of the Upper Midwest.
Originally from Chicago, Dana C. Gravesen is a first-year MA student in the department of Cinema Studies. He received his BFA from the same department in 2004. This is Dana's fourth appearance at the student conference, having previously presented work on the representation of cultural paranoia in the self-reflexive horror film, the history of discourse in American horror fandom, and star theory. Dana is also staff film critic for www.classic-horror.com. Current research includes neo/formalist film studies and the aesthetic of sensation, shifts in representation in the American horror film as a result of domestic technological development, and contemporary queer studies related to the depiction and celebration of deviant sexuality in film and literature. He shares a birthday with John Carpenter and Kate Moss, and hopes to one day host a joint tea party with both of them.
Daniel Gwinnell is currently pursuing an MPA in International Nonprofit Management and Policy at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He earned his B.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2006. He is completely in love with Jack Bauer.
Marta Hafner is a Cinema Studies MA candidate at New York University. She earned her BA in America Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She just wants to be your Netflix friend.
David Harvey has a BA (2002) and MA (2007,pending) in Cinema Studies from NYU. He plans to continue pursing interests that include the essay film, difference and phenomenology in a doctoral program.
When not rocking out to "Tear Me Down," Ben Horner drives around in a van solving mysteries.*
Adam is a second year M.A. student in Cinema Studies at NYU with a B.A. in American Studies from Brandeis University. He is the co-founder of SunDeis: The New England College Film Festival (now in its fourth year) and he once made a documentary about collegiate ballroom dancing that played in a couple of film festivals. Adam is interested in contemporary American Jewish cinema and is proud to be Canadian.
Anuja Jain is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU. She received her B.A, M.A and M.Phil. in English Literature from University of Delhi, India. Her dissertation project is a comparative study of the representations of the “communal” riot and demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 and subsequent sectarian violence in Bombay (1992-1993) in Indian documentaries and Hindi popular cinema. She aims to explore the way in which this moment of sectarian violence has been selectively invoked and re-worked in multiple contexts by various practitioners, both in documentaries as well as in popular fiction films and the ways in which certain iconic images emerge and are recycled.
Myles David Jewell is a year first MA candidate in the Cinema Studies program at NYU. He grew up west of Boston in Sudbury MA, and received his bachelor’s in English and Anthropology from the University of Vermont. Myles is also a part of the Culture/Media program offered at NYU.
Martin Johnson is a first-year PhD student in Cinema Studies. He has a master's degree in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor's degree in modern culture and media from Brown University.
Jennifer Kelly is an M.A. candidate in the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought. She received a B.A. in Feminist Studies, with emphases on race and representation, and a B.A. in Literature, with an emphasis in Modern Literary Studies, from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature after she earns her Master's Degree and eventually plans to teach across the disciplines of Feminist Studies, Literature, and Postcolonial Studies.
Ohad Landesman is a PhD candidate in the department, from which he holds a Masters degree too. In addition, he has a bachelor degree in Film and Television and a LL.B (Bachelor of Laws) from Tel-Aviv University. He is currently working on his dissertation exploring digital video aesthetics in contemporary cinema. His writings have appeared in various publications such as Film Comment, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, IndieWIRE, and the Israeli daily newspaper Ma’ariv.
Carolina Larrain was born and bred in the UK in the 1980s and moved to Chile in the mid 90s, where she later obtained a degree in Sociology and a degree in Documentary Film while working as a teaching assistant at her university’s Aesthetic and Visual Communication departments. She is currently following an MA in Cinema Studies at NYU thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship and a Chilean Presidential Grant. Her main interests and research experience are linked to national representations and collective identities in film and is at present writing a book on Chilean Documentary Film in the 50s and 70s with her research team in Santiago as well as working on a documentary film trilogy on personal identity and space.
Robert Lightning was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He has been a regular contributor to the film journal CineAction since 1991. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the New School University in 2004 and is currently pursuing his Masters in Cinema Studies at New York University.
Ben McCormick grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and received his BA in British and American Literature from New College of Florida. His sense of the world was formed mostly by listening to mid-90s indie rock and by walking through woods. His research interests focus on literary modernism, and he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature.
Jeffrey Richardson is a M.A. candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. He received his B.A. in Film and Video Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a native of Williamsburg, Michigan.
Maggie Riggs will graduate this May from the Draper program, having specialized in film, gender & sexuality studies and human rights. She hopes to do research and advocacy work for a human rights related non-profit organization. If you know any that will hire her, please pass on her information. If this plan doesn’t work out, she will run away and join the circus.
Rachel Shields got her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington and her M.A. in interdisciplinary literature studies from New York University. Her Master's thesis project was on the stylistic and content differences between books written for young adults and those written for adults. She is currently fleeing the New York City Teaching Fellows Program and plans to either complete her PhD in English Literature or enter a film production program.
Kurt Shulenberger is a recent graduate from the Graduate Cinema Studies department at NYU. Prior to that, he received a BA in Cinema from San Francisco State University. He has been serving America since 1982.
Elizabeth Stephens is currently working on her M.A. in Cinema Studies. She earned a B.A. in Music and Communication Studies with a dual emphasis in Media Studies and Media Production, as well as a minor in Political Science from the University of Missouri--Kansas City. Liz lives in New York City and is an experimental filmmaker who aspires to achieve an M.F.A. in Film Production after graduation.
Lydia Storie keeps waking up to find that it is
, and she is back in her home town of Edinburgh, Indiana.
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Sueyoung Park-Primiano is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Cinema Studies Department at New York University.
Anoosh Tertzakian was born in Santa Monica, California and is a first-year M.A. candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU, pursuing the Certificate in Media and Culture. She received her B.A. in Film and Media Studies at the American University of Paris, and in her current studies is focusing on Armenian cinema, especially pertaining to historiography, identity, and Diaspora. Her interest lies specifically in the creation of bonds between peoples over national boundaries through film and television, and what roles broadcasting and distribution systems play in the international dynamics of identity.
Victoria E. Wunsch recently earned her MA from New York University’s Cinema Studies program. She has also completed a graduate certificate in Documentary Filmmaking from the George Washington University and earned her B.A. in Spanish from the University of Richmond. She has worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC) in the Film and Video Center and in the Office of External Affairs. She has also worked at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao, Spain).
* Biographies denoted with an asterisk (*) are ghost-written and do not necessarily reflect the actual thoughts, feelings, or reality of the persons in question. The 2007 Cinema & Media Student Conference takes no responsibility for any misunderstandings these faux biographies may have caused.