Sponsored by the College of Media, Communication, and Information and the Department of Critical Media Practices, the Center offers two fellowship positions to the prestigious Flaherty Seminar, curated this year by Janaína Oliveira. Graduate students in good standing who are enrolled in programs within the College of Media, Communication and Information are eligible to apply.
"In the twenty-seven years for which they have been continuously held, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminars have become firmly established as an institution in the world of independent film.
These week-long Seminars now provide an annual meeting ground for about one hundred filmmakers, critics, librarians, scholars and students. The experience they undergo is of a total immersion in films, an unremitting barrage of impressions, analyses, critiques and confrontations, built around seven days of morning-to-night screenings."
- Jack Churchill
About the Fellows Program
The Flaherty offers a limited number of fellowships to graduate students, emerging filmmakers, and mid-career professionals who would be unable to attend the Seminar without financial support. The fellows’ program is rigorous and rewarding and is designed to encourage diversity of geography, ethnicity, class and experience levels within the participant pool, which is essential in providing the unique critical experience of the Flaherty.
Fellowships and grants provide an extraordinary opportunity for selected fellows to energize their creativity and further their professional development. They will share and build on their Seminar experiences after they return home for years to come. Many of the filmmakers and fellows who have attended the Flaherty have frequently referred to the Seminar as the place where their ideas took shape, their work began to be recognized, and they found important collaborators; in brief, they consider the Flaherty as a watershed experience in their careers.
The fellowship program offers fellows an extra day on campus before the Seminar begins to meet with the Seminar programmer and Flaherty board members, participate in two master classes, and watch and discuss each other’s films, by way of an informal fellows screening program. During the Seminar week, fellows take part in lunchtime roundtable discussions with guest filmmakers, programmers, and other attendees.
The program is led by a Fellows Coordinator, who has attended previous Flaherty Seminars, and is designed to further the fellow’s knowledge of cinema through participation in an array of unique discussions. Fellows participate in all general Seminar activities and are asked to write a report following the Seminar outlining their thoughts on the fellows’ program and the Seminar in general.
2020 Flaherty Seminar Fellows Coordinator
Nehad Khader (2017 Flaherty Fellow) is a filmmaker, curator, editor and writer whose work in film informs her work as a historian and vice versa. Trained in media and literature by Black and Palestinian creators, Nehad believes in art that carries aesthetic excellence as well as social and political significance. She is the Program Director of BlackStar Film Festival. Nehad is a 2017 Leeway Transformation Award winner, a 2018 Tribeca Film Institute fellow, and a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Fellow. She was selected by the Palestine Film Institute to inaugurate the Palestine Pavilion at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. She is the producer of “White Fright,” now streaming on The Guardian. When not watching films, Nehad enjoys reading fiction, singing and gardening.