Due to COVID 19, Cinema students who needed to fulfill their internship requirement, in Summer 2020, where left without any options. Cinema faculty moved to action and with admin blessings, modified this requirement to a Capstone course. The Capstone course, in addition to course work, included a component where students would interact with industry professionals.
Prof. Lucy G/E reached out to people in her network and lined up a series of guest speakers, who graciously, answered the call, volunteered their time to share their expertise with her students. Cinema students got to interact in class (via zoom) with the following film professionals and academics:
Mika Pryce is the Head of Development at Don Cheadle’s new production company, Radicle Act Productions. The aim of Radicle Act is to center historically marginalized voices across a number of platforms including television, film and theater.
Previously, she was an executive at Universal Pictures where she worked on titles such as Good Boys, Little and Blumhouse’s Get Out. Prior to Universal, Pryce worked as an executive at the independent production company and financier Red Granite Pictures.
Pryce attended the Peter Stark Producing Program in Los Angeles. During her studies there, she worked at CAA’s investment bank, Evolution Media Capital, before going on to work in foreign sales at Lionsgate International and then at the Warner Bros. based Langley Park Pictures. Before moving to Los Angeles she worked in physical production in New York City.
Alrick Brown is Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Film and Television at NYU – Tisch School of the Arts. An award winning writer and director, Alrick graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and a Masters of Education. He received his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Education is Alrick’s first calling, but he found his medium, film, after visiting the slave castle of Elmina, in Ghana, during a two-year tour with the Peace Corps in Cote d’Ivoire. The interactions with the people of his village, and his overall experiences in West Africa, informed his creative expression. An expression first fostered by his birth in Kingston, Jamaica and migration to, and upbringing in Plainfield, New Jersey. An activist and highly sought public speaker, Alrick’s commitment to social, political and economic justice, and revealing the heart of the world through the craft of storytelling is what draws audiences and peers to his work. Alrick’s cinematic reach includes credits on the small screen as director, producer and writer on a variety of projects – ABC’s Final Witness, ESPN’s short doc series Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joint, and Investigative Discoveries Emmy-Award winning series A Crime Two Remember. His published work has appeared in the Huffington Post as well as the New Jersey English Journal.
Featured in Filmmaker Magazine as the “New Faces of Independent Film Making (Links to an external site.)”, Alrick has a long filmography to his credit. His collective body of film work has screened in numerous festivals worldwide, earning several honors. Among them is the HBO Life Through Your Lens Emerging Filmmaker Award for the critically acclaimed documentary Death of Two Sons. Alrick’s first feature, Kinyarwanda, was recipient of the prestigious Sundance World Cinema Audience Award. He has previously taught undergraduate courses on the African American image in cinema at Rutgers University, film production at The Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, and at Goddard College where he was a faculty advisor for the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program.
Hans Charles studied cinema at the Los Angeles Film Studies Center and worked for Tracey Edmonds (Soulfood, Set it Off), Bridget Davis (Sister Act II, Hav Plenty) and Patrick Ian Polk (Punks, Noah’s Ark) at Edmonds Entertainment.
Later, he pursued his MFA in film at Howard University’s school of communication. While a graduate student, he produced his first feature, Like Water, then developed an eye for cinematography. He has shot for a range of directors, including Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay (Venus Vs.) and Salim Akil (Jumping the Broom, Sparkle) and has worked on several films, including Entre Nos, Pariah, Middle of Nowhere, and Mother of George. They’ve screened at festivals all over the world, including Urban World Film Festival, the New York City Latino Film Festival, OutFest, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Zanzibar Film Festival, the Black Star film festival, HBO and ESPN. Charles has been a professor of cinematography at Howard University and is currently working on BET network’s new television series, The Start Up.
The docuseries he shot “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (Links to an external site.)” was screened at Sundance in 2019 and is now on Showtime. Hans Charles was recently nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for the movie 13TH by Ava Duvernay – Academy Award Nominated and Best Documentary BAFTA / Independent Spirit Awards. “One Angry Black Man”, a film he shot and produced in 2018, was picked up for distribution and is now available on demand. MFA, Cinematography, Howard University (2010)
Fred North, featured recently in Vulture Magazine (Links to an external site.), is a sought after an aerial Cinematographer/Stunt Pilot, who is credited with his work on the series “”Fast & The Furious” franchise films. Fred works around the world and lives in LA. He has traveled the world shooting for films from the air in some of the most amazing places in the world. Here is a list of his filmography on Imdb: Fred North Filmmography (Links to an external site.). Fred has agreed to speak to my students about his work and give them insight into a world that is not even covered in film courses “Aerial Cinematography”. From his website, more on Fred North.
Kinyette S. Newman is the Vice President of Production Finance and Operations at TV One. She is responsible for managing all aspects of production finance, tax credit incentive programs and the greenlight process for all original programming and acquisitions. She joined the company in 2005 as Director of Production Management.
Prior to TV One, Miss Newman worked for Discovery Communications where she was a Production Manager, providing budget oversight for original programming for Discovery Channel, TCL, Animal Planet, Discovery Health Discovery Times and Travel Channel for 5 years.
Miss Newman began her career in production management with Discovery Communications as a production coordinator. She holds a B.A. in Communication from George Mason University and an MFA in Film from Howard University.
She is a member of the Psi Epsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority where she served as Financial Secretary from 2010-2012 and was appointed Assistant Financial Secretary in 2013. She currently serves as the Chaplain since being appointed in 2016.
Jordan Mattos is a New York-based film distributor with over 10 years of experience in licensing content in the USA. Since 2006 he has led the theatrical and home entertainment distribution of hundreds of films from Europe, Africa and South America at arthouse label IndiePix. In 2016 he founded sales company Aspect Ratio, working with international producers seeking to enter the US market.
In 2018 he co-founded Cinemarket, a blockchain based digital market aimed at producers looking to license films to international buyers, which launched at the Marche du Film in Cannes. Jordan is currently the US programming consultant for Critics Week at the Venice Film Festival, and Head of Industry for the Toronto Queer Film Festival.
Yared Zeleke was born and raised in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, until he immigrated to the U.S. at the age of ten. Zeleke earned his MFA in Writing and Directing at New York University, where his thesis short film, Lottery Boy, earned him an award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency in 2012.
Zeleke’s first feature, Lamb, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. It was the first Ethiopian film to be included in the “Official Selection”. The North American premier was at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Lamb garnered much press with positive reviews from major media outlets including theBBC, CNN, PBS, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and theNew York Times. In the November issue of Variety magazine that year, Zeleke wasfeatured among the “10 Screenwriters to Watch”.
Lamb made the shortlist for the 2016 Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film Award. It hassince been nominated as well as winning “Best Film” prizes in many worldwide festivals.Lamb has sold to over thirty territories, including the U.S. and China.Zeleke is currently working on his second feature script, Sunbirds, which was awarded aRockefeller Foundation Fellowship. The screenplay has also received a grant from theSan Francisco Film Society for 2016/17. Presently, the Sundance Institute is mentoringZeleke on Sunbirds through its FilmTwo Initiative.
Comments