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Jump to... Professors - Daniel Boord - Jim Palmer - Phil Solomon Associate Professors - Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz - Melinda Barlow - Suranjan Ganguly Assistant Professors - Clark Farmer - Jennifer Peterson - Travis Wilkerson Instructors - Jerry Aronson - Don Yannacito Adjuncts Related Faculty - Austin Allen - Bruce Kawin Visiting Faculty Jean-Pierre Gorin Nathaniel Dorsky Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson Julie Murray

Full Professors

Daniel Boord

is among the second generation of video artists in the Unites States. He is known for his collaboration with Argentine artist Luis Valdovino and their exploration of cultural identity at the edges of globalized corporate culture. He has also collaborated with filmmaker Greg Durbin. Boord and his collaborators explore and test notions of everyday life through the creation of what the art critic and poet David Antin calls “homeless narratives”. Boord’s works have been twice selected for screening by the La Biennale Di Venezia, the Venice Film festival - once in 2000 and then in 2003. His works have been broadcast on WNET, New York and WGBH, Boston and presented at the International Public Television Conference in Stockholm. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Long Beach Museum, Long Beach, CA; the Art Museum; University of California, Berkeley and the Everson Museum; Syracuse, NY. His work has been exhibited at the the Toronto International Film Festival; Edinburgh Film Festival, Scotland; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art; New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Madrid, Spain; International Center of Photography, New York; Black Maria Film/Video Festival; The Black International Cinema festival , Vienna, Austria; Dallas Video Festival, Athens International Film/Video Festival, Athens, OH; The AFI Film/Video Festival, American Film Institute, Los Angeles, CA; National Video Festival, American Film Institute, Los Angeles, CA.

Jim Palmer

(Ph.D. Claremont Graduate School), Professor, Director of the World Affairs Conference, Director of the Farrand Academic Program, is the co-author of The Films of Joseph Losey (with Michael Riley, Cambridge University Press, 1993), and a contributing editor to Literature/Film Quarterly. Professor Palmer is the recipient of many teaching awards, including the Presidential Teaching Scholar Award, the Teacher of the Year Award, and the Boulder Faculty Assembly Service Award. He has been the Film Studies Program Director, as well as Acting Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, and has distinguished himself in service to the University on numerous administrative positions. His work has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, and Film Heritage among other journals. Professor Palmer has lectured extensively throughout the state and the nation on film, literature and psychology. He teaches courses on Humanities and Film, Jung, Film and Literature, Film and the Quest for Truth, and others. The Conference on World Affairs, which he directs, attracts scholars, artists and activists from the US and the World to the Boulder Campus every year.

Phil Solomon

(M.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art) is an internationally recognized filmmaker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at CU since 1991. Professor Solomon’s work has been screened in every major venue for experimental film throughout the U.S. and Europe and he has had 3 Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art and has been twice included in the Whitney Biennial. Professor Solomon’s films have won 9 first prize awards at major international film festivals for experimental film (including seven Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival) and he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. His films reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Massachusetts College of Art, Binghamton University, Hampshire College, The Chicago Art Institute, San Francisco State University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Oberhausen Film Collection. Professor Solomon collaborated on three films with the late Stan Brakhage, who named one of Solomon’s films on his “Top Ten Films of All Time” list for Sight and Sound. Professor Solomon is currently working on a feature length series of short films entitled The Twilight Psalms, a cine-poem of the 20th century. The first three films of this series premiered at the New York Film Festival, where Walking Distance was cited by critic Stephen Holden of the New York Times as being ‘supremely lyrical’. Professor Solomon has recently received a commission from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to create a six- channel digital installation entitled American Falls, currently scheduled to open in the Corcoran rotunda in spring 2006. He has also begun work on a book entitled A Snail’s Trail in the Moonlight: Conversations with Brakhage, transcriptions of several years of Brakhage’s film salons.

Associate Professors

Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz

(Ph.D., University of Iowa), is the author of the books Pedro Almodovar (BFI, 2007) and Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (University of California Press, 2003) and winner of the Leslie & Woody Eaton Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in the Humanities & the Arts. Prof. Acevedo-Muñoz is the recipient of grants from the CU Council on Research and Creative Work, the Graduate Committee on the Arts & Humanities, and a co-winner of the Vice Chancellor's Diversity and Equity award. At CU he teaches film theory, film & literature, Latin American and Spanish cinemas & culture, Hollywood genres, and courses on Luis Buñuel & Pedro Almodovar, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock. Professor Acevedo-Muñoz's work has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Film & History, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, After Hitchcock: Imitation-Influence-Intertextuality, Healing Cultures: Art and Religion in the Caribbean and its Diaspora, Buñuel Siglo XXI and Genre, Gender, Race & World Cinema. Professor Acevedo-Muñoz has lectured and spoken in meetings and conferences in the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, Canada and Puerto Rico, his native country. A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico (B.A. 1991) and the University of Iowa (M.A. 1994, Ph.D. 1998), Prof. Acevedo-Muñoz also studied in the film production workshop at New York University in Manhattan. He has taught at New York University in Madrid, Spain, and at the University of Iowa, where he was also a research and dissertation fellow. At the University of Colorado since 1998, Dr. Acevedo-Muñoz holds a joint membership with the Department of Comparative Literature & Humanities. He is currently making a movie called Hillmon's Bones, writing a book tentatively entitled The Most Beautiful Sound That I Ever Heard: West Side Story and researching a book on questions of film theory in Latin American cinemas.

Melinda Barlow

(Ph.D., New York University), Associate Professor, taught at New York University, New York’s School of Visual Arts, and at Queens College, City University of New York, before coming to CU in 1996. The editor of Mary Lucier: Art and Performance (2000), published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, Professor Barlow is a film and video historian who specializes in the work of contemporary independent women film and videomakers. Her articles have appeared in such publications as Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Millennium Film Journal, Art Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Art in America, Afterimage, Sculpture, American Theatre, and the Spanish animation journal Animac. A recipient of the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Award in Video Criticism from the Video Data Bank as well as the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award, the Dorothy Martin Woman Faculty Award, and the Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of Colorado, Professor Barlow was awarded a Fellowship from CU’s Center for the Humanities and the Arts in 2005 to participate in their "Powers of Wonder" Seminar. The founder of the Leah Kelly Memorial Award, the first CU Film Studies Program award in the critical study of cinema, Professor Barlow is the Honors Council representative for Film Studies, and the Faculty Advisor for the Undergraduate Academy Lead TA Pre-Prof Program. She teaches Film History I & II, a popular course on Women and Film, and a series of specialized upper-level seminars on various decades of American film history. She is currently at work on a series of essays on experimental filmmaker Janie Geiser titled Curiosa in Motion: Automata, Dioramas, and Celluloid Reliquaries, and her book Lost Objects of Desire: Video Installation, Mary Lucier, and the Romance of History, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Suranjan Ganguly

(Ph.D. Purdue University) was chair of Film Studies from 2000 to 2005. He is the author of Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern. His work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Film Criticism, East-West Quarterly Review, Ariel, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, Journal of South Asian Literature, and Asian Cinema. He is currently working on a book on Adoor Gopalakrishnan, India’s most distinguished contemporary filmmaker. A specialist in international cinema, Professor Ganguly teaches a wide range of courses that primarily cover European and Asian cinema. He also offers interdisciplinary courses that explore the relationships between film, photography, and painting. In recent years, he has been offering such courses in Paris and Rome through the Study Abroad Summer Program at CU. A close friend of Stan Brakhage’s, he runs a monthly film series—Celebrating Stan—in honor of the filmmaker. Originally from Calcutta, Prof. Ganguly studied at St. Xavier’s College and Jadavpur University before coming to the US. His Ph.D. dissertation was a study of the work of Satyajit Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Virginia Woolf.

Assistant Professors

Clark Farmer

(Ph.D. University of Iowa), Assistant Professor, taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, and Clark University before coming to CU in 2003. He was awarded a Fulbright in 1999 to conduct research on opera and the New German Cinema. His teaching interests include German cinema, color and cinema, film comedy, film theory, film and the other arts, gender and film, popular Asian cinemas, and studio-era Hollywood film.

Jennifer Peterson

(Ph.D. University of Chicago), Assistant Professor. Before coming to CU in Fall 2005, Jennifer Peterson taught at the University of California at Riverside, the University of Southern California, and the California Institute of the Arts. She also worked as an Oral Historian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, American Cinema's Transitional Era, and The Time Machine: Cinema and Travel. She is currently completing work on a book entitled Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Silent Nonfiction Film, to be published by Duke University Press. Her research interests include silent-era cinema, documentary film, and the representation of animals in film. She teaches Film History I and II, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Women and Film, and British Cinema.

Travis Wilkerson

(M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts) joins CU Film Studies as an Assistant Professor this fall. A chance meeting in Havana with legendary Cuban film propagandist Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson's life. He now makes films in the tradition of the "third cinema," wedding politics to form in an indivisible manner. His best-known work is an agit-prop essay on the lynching of Wobbly Frank Little called "An Injury to One." His other films include "Accelerated Underdevelopment" (on the filmmaker Santiago Alvarez), "Who Killed Cock Robin?", and the National Archive series. Recently, he presented the first ever performance art at the Sundance Film Festival with "Proving Ground," a live multi-media rumination on the history of bombing. His work has screened at scores of festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Toronto, Rotterdam, Marseille, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Hot Docs, Vienna International Film Festival and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Instructors

Jerry Aronson, Retired

(Advanced Certificate, AFI, Los Angeles; M.S., Institute of Design, IIT, Chicago) Mr. Aronson, a Senior Instructor, is a distinguished documentary filmmaker and teacher. One of his best-known films is The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, a winner of the International Documentary Association Award in 1993, a finalist for a Peabody award, as well as over 250 national and international awards and screenings. The 2 disk, 8 hour DVD set was released in 2006 by New Yorker Films. His film The Divided Trail earned an Academy Award Nomination for best documentary short in 1978 and was broadcast on a special PBS series in 1980 entitled: Matters of Life and Death. His six-hour documentary mini-series American Music: The Roots of Country aired to wide acclaim on TBS in 1996. He has won grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities. He also collaborated with Stan Brakhage. Among his many other award winning films are Fun With Lines, Old Glory Marching Society, Superstars, and Options. Mr. Aronson teaches intermediate and advanced film production, primarily focusing on the video based advanced production class: Making the Personal Documentary. Mr. Aronson has been with the department for over 34 years. He is responsible for establishing the Production Department within Film Studies with founder Virgil Grillo in 1973, established the successful internship program in 1979 and was instrumental in establishing our BA/BFA film major in 1989. Jerry was awarded the prestigious Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award in the Spring of 2006.

Don Yannacito

(M.A. University of Colorado at Denver) Senior Instructor, has been teaching Beginning Super 8 film classes to new students in our program since 1978. In addition to teaching Super 8 filmmaking for over 26 years, Mr. Yannacito has also taught "The History of Avant-Garde Film" with Sally Dixon and a beginning 16mm production course. In his capacity as a film programmer and curator of the First Person Cinema Program, Mr. Yannacito has been bringing independent films and filmmakers to the University of Colorado for over 35 years. He has been a judge and reviewer on numerous panels for grants and fellowships, and has had some of his writing on the field published in Rolling Stock magazine and the Colorado Daily newspaper. Mr. Yannacito has also been a staff member of the Film Studies Program and assistant to the chair for over 30 years.

Recent Adjuncts

Adjuncts who have taught for Film Studies include: J. Gluckstern has made several short films and is the visual arts critic for the Boulder Daily Camera. He has taught beginning and intermediate filmmaking. Stacy Steers has been working as an indepedent animator since the early 80s. Her prize winning films include Watunna (1989) and Totem (1998). She has taught a very popular animation class. Patti Bruck is a film and video maker, curator and critic. She has taught beginning and intermediate filmmaking. Roger Carter graduated from the UCLA film school and has since worked in film and video production for over twenty five years as a producer, director, director of photography and as a business owner of a producers service and grip, lighting and camera rental company. Broadcast and theatrical projects include ABC's 20-20, HBO, Showtime, Unsolved Mysteries, Wild America and several TV movies and feature films as second unit DP or additional photography or B camera. Awards include: Bronze, Silver and Grand Tellies, Cine Golden Eagles, Venice and Salerno Film Festivals, Denver AD Club Grand Alphie and the Angenieux award for Outstanding Cinematogrpahy. Roger has been teaching film and video courses in Colorado for the last ten years.

Related Faculty

Austin Allen

(M.A., Ph.D., Ohio University) In conjunction with the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Colorado-Denver, Professor Austin Allen offers a class in Cinema and the Landscape: An Exploration of Place and Digital Production. Austin Allen is interested in landscape and urbanism, design of public space, film studies and production, and public media. He is Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at UC-Denver, and is involved in design studios to assist in the rebuild of the Lower Ninth Ward within the City of New Orleans. He is also an independent filmmaker and editor, with work including “Claiming Open Spaces,” a feature-length documentary. He is currently working on a documentary titled “In the Site of the Unseen,” on Frederick Law Olmsted and the impact of his work on diversity and African-American cultural life. Prior to CU-Denver, he served as Division Director for Media Arts and Technology in the School of Communication at Cleveland State University, and was Interim Director of First College, the integrative college at Cleveland State, as well as Director of the CSU Prison Media Literacy Project. He holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication, School of Telecommunication, Ohio University, with work in the School of Film; a Master of Arts, Ohio University, as a Fellow in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Women and Minorities Public Telecommunications Management Program; a bachelor degree in Landscape Architecture, University of California at Berkeley and, an Associate Arts, Laney Community College, Oakland in Urban Studies.

Bruce Kawin

(M.F.A., Columbia University; Ph.D. Cornell University), Professor, rostered in English, teaches classes in film history, creative writing, and modern British and American literature. He is extremely prolific having written three books of narrative theory (Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film; Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film; and The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable), three books on Faulkner (Faulkner and Film, To Have and Have Not [ed.], and Faulkner's MGM Screenplays), and How Movies Work. An introductory "film appreciation" textbook, How Movies Work is a technically comprehensive, excellent one-volume introduction to film aesthetics as well as film production. Finally, beginning with the fifth edition, he has been co-author of the late Gerald Mast's A Short History of the Movies. In addition, he has been on the Executive Committee of the Society for Cinema Studies and the editorial boards of Genders, Post Script, and Cinema Journal. His talents extend to poetry and screenwriting. His professional screenwriting includes unsold treatments for The Godfather Part III and Part IV, the treatment and first scripts for The Grifters, a basketball script co-written by Howie Movshovitz (The Starters), and a new script, based on the works of Arthur Machen (The Gold Tiberius). Special scholarly interests include William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Jim Thompson, film history, narrative theory, and the horror film.

Visiting Faculty

Jean-Pierre Gorin, Summer 2007

began his filmmaking career in the mid Sixties. After meeting filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard the two created the infamous Dziga Vertov Group which has long been recognized as seminal to the period of radical filmmaking of the late Sixties and early Seventies. They are historically significant for their pioneering critical reexamination of film "language" and its ideological implications. During his time with the Dziga Vertov Group, Gorin and Godard codirected several overtly political films. In 1975 Gorin left France to join the faculty of the UCSD Visual Arts Department. At UCSD his investigation of narrative led him toward documentary. He attempted to redefine the parameters of the genre in a series of three essay films which form a Southern California trilogy. These films have been selected for major film festivals both in Europe and the US. Gorin has remained at UCSD where he teaches courses in film history and criticism.

Jean-Pierre Gorin will be offering a course "B" term summer 2007, July 10 to August 10, 2007. He will offer FILM 4010/ARTF 5010: Film/Cultures, an exploration of film at the intersections of art and culture. The course has as its goal a book/object, produced as it were in the "flow," with an emphasis of graphic and visual strategies and the integration/utilization of new media technological elements.

Nathaniel Dorsky, Fall 2007

Nathaniel Dorsky has been making films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964, exhibiting and receiving honors at the Museum of Modern Art, the Lincoln Center and the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Louvre and Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as showing at the New York Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, the Toronto Film Festival and more. He also received the Emmy Award for art cinematography, for Gauguin in Tahiti (1967), as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson, Fall 2007-Spring 2008

"[…] From the inventive ways that they create images on the film strip to the use of multiple projection that often incorporates live performance, Gibson and Recoder are two of the most vital young artists working in the field of "expanded cinema"." - Mark Webber, Times BFI London Film Festival

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have screened their work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Cal Arts (Valencia), Images Festival (Toronto), Institute for Contemporary Art (London), and many more.

Julie Murray, Fall 2006-Spring 2007

Julie Murray was born in Dublin, Ireland, where she received Degree in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. As a Fulbright Scholar, she moved to San Francisco to pursue her post-graduate studies. She has shown at the Hong Kong International Film Festival , 41st NY film festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, Pacific Film Archives, and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam Netherlands.