Filmmaking and Moving Image Arts

Step behind the camera and discover the world of cinematic storytelling. This immersive course is designed for aspiring filmmakers ready to bring their creative visions to life. From crafting powerful scripts to directing with confidence, students will gain essential skills in screenwriting, visual storytelling, and working with actors. Through hands-on exercises, scene breakdowns, and collaborative filmmaking projects, students will learn to shape compelling narratives and discover their own creative voice. No prior experience is required—just the courage to tell your story on the big screen. Because of the workshop nature of this course, we will meet once a week for three hours. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

In an age in which narratives shape perceptions and drive societal change, this course will invite students to explore the profound art of documentary filmmaking. The course will offer a comprehensive introduction to the practices and principles of creating compelling documentaries that illuminate the human experience. Students will develop a critical understanding of the power of nonfiction stories while investigating the narrative structures, technical skills, and ethical considerations that underpin the documentary form. Through hands-on workshops, screenings, group discussions, and individual projects, students will gain valuable insights into the creative process while developing their unique voice as filmmakers. The course will cover the foundational elements of documentary production and essential topics, including the historical evolution of documentary, techniques for effective storytelling and interviewing, research, camera and lighting styles, editing, and the role of the filmmaker as both creator and curator of real-life stories. By the end of the course, students will have conceived, filmed, directed, produced, and edited a three- to five-minute documentary short while also learning to capture the essence of life on film as they harness the power of true storytelling to inform, inspire, and engage. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, students will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio's divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

In this course, students will develop animation and micro storytelling skills by focusing on the process of creating frame-by-frame digital drawings and keyframe movement for animation. This course will serve as an introduction to both the professional digital software Harmony by Toon Boom and the process of digital drawing and character movement. Instruction will include line style, visualization, character development, continuity, timing, and compositing. All production steps required to develop simple, 2D digital animations will be demonstrated and applied through exercises aimed at the production of a single animated scene. Students will develop and refine their personal style through exercises in digital animation and assignments directed at increasing visual understanding. Students will learn about body mechanics and motion flow in the development of animated characters and backgrounds through techniques that include walk cycles, rotating forms, transformations, holds, smear frames, squash and stretch, weight, and resistance. Additional instruction will include techniques in pencil-test animation, camera and layer animated movements, color palettes, and lip syncing. This course will provide students with a working knowledge of the emerging and highly efficient software Harmony, recently adopted by the film and television animation industry. The final project will involve each student's production of a single, refined animated scene.

At a time when digital, three-dimensional (3D) space has saturated our visual vocabulary in everything from design and entertainment to gaming, now more than ever it is important to explore the interface of this space and find methods for unlocking its potential. This will be an introductory course for Maya, the industry-standard 3D modeling and animation software. We will learn the fundamental approaches to environment building, 3D modeling, character creation, character rigging, and keyframe animation. This course will also provide a comprehensive understanding of the important process of rendering, using texturing, lighting, and staging. We will explore how all of these processes may culminate in narrative-based animations, alongside how 3D constructions can be exported into everything from film projects to physical media. Great emphasis will be placed on experimentation in navigating between digital and physical processes. Exercises and assignments will be contextualized through lectures and with readings of both historical and contemporary creators in the field.

This course will focus on the concepts of character-design development as a preproduction stage to animation. Students will gain knowledge in drawing by learning formal spatial concepts in order to create, both visually and conceptually, fully realized characters. Through the development of character boards, model sheets, beat boards, and character animatic projects, students will draw and conceptualize human, animal, mechanical, and hybrid figures. Students will research characters in their visual, environmental, psychological, and social aspects to establish a full understanding of characterization. Both hand-drawn materials and digital drawing will be used throughout the semester. Students may use their choice of drawing software, based on their own experience and skill level. Students will have access to the animation rooms with a variety of software options, including Storyboard Pro, Harmony, Photoshop, Illustrator, and editing software Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier. Students new to digital drawing will work in Storyboard Pro software; students with personal access to Procreate may also use this iPad-based art studio software. Assignments and projects will include character boards, model sheets, and animatics. There will be daily character drawing exercises, structural anatomy demonstrations, basic digital drawing concepts, and empirical perspective drawing discussions throughout the semester. This is a labor-intensive drawing course, which requires a commitment to developing drawing skills. Good drawing demands time, commitment, and intelligence. The final conference project is a concept-based, fully-developed character animatic. Knowledge from this course can be used to create and enhance animations; to establish a character outline for an interactive media project; or to help in developing a cast of characters for game design, graphic novels, or narrative film.

This course will further enhance the development of 2D animation concepts and techniques. Students are expected to have introductory knowledge of Toon Boom Animation's Harmony software—the global standard for animation and storyboarding—and to be comfortable with basic animation skills. As an intermediate/advanced course, students will delve deeper into animation fundamentals and explore advanced techniques, including shift and trace, motion arcs, and secondary movements. Additionally, students will expand their proficiency in Harmony software by developing advanced camera techniques, utilizing traditional and auto lip-sync tools, leveraging nodes for lighting and effects, and exploring a variety of advanced tools. Students will enrich their drawing and animation skills by understanding body mechanics and motion flow, focusing on techniques such as animated cycles, rotating forms, transformations, timing and pacing, weight, and resistance. Through the creation of multiple animation projects, intermediate-level students will apply these new techniques, develop scene construction abilities, and ultimately produce a final animation project. The capstone project will be the creation of a short, multiple-scene animation. Advanced-level students will have the opportunity to work independently on an original concept throughout the semester, culminating in the development of a fully-realized animated film. Harmony, serving as the primary software incorporated in this course, will be provided to each student through the Animation Lab. Information and skills acquired in this class can be applied to improve drawing and animation proficiency, establish fundamentals for digital animation production, and enhance an animation portfolio.

This course will explore the foundational workflows of post-production sound for film and moving images. From dialogue editing to sound design and creating immersive soundscapes, we will break down the tools and approaches available that help shape the sonic experience of a film. Starting our lessons in Adobe Premiere and moving our work into Pro Tools, students will learn techniques to edit and layer audio tracks in both softwares while organizing them into Pro Tools templates for editing and mixing. We will cover topics such as equalization (EQ), compression, reverb, Loudness Units Full Scale (LUFS), noise reduction, room tone, aux buses, cinematic sound effects (SFX), and ambiences. Students will collaborate with film production classes to finalize post-production sound for a picture-locked cut in Pro Tools, using the skills learned in class. We will cover a basic intro to field recording with Zoom recorders to capture stereo ambiences that can be used in the projects that students make for class. Through hands-on exercises and critical listening, we will focus on how sound creates atmosphere and brings a cinematic world to life.

This course will focus on the art of storyboard construction as the preproduction stage and previsualization for graphics, film/video, and animation. Students will be introduced to storyboard strategies, exploring visual concepts such as shot types, continuity, pacing, transitions, and sequencing into visual communication. Both classical and experimental techniques for creating storyboards will be covered. Emphasis will be placed on production of storyboard drawings, both by hand and digitally, to negotiate sequential image development and establish shot-by-shot progression, staging, frame composition, editing, and continuity in film and other media. Instruction will concentrate primarily on drawing from thumbnail sketches through final presentation storyboards and animatics. The final project for this class will be the production by each student of a full presentation storyboard and a low-resolution animatic in a combined visual, audio, and text presentation format. Knowledge of storyboards and animatics from this class can be used for idea development and presentation of your project to collaborators, pitching projects, professional agencies, and—most importantly—for you, the maker.

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world.

Sound has immense importance in film language as a semantic, metaphoric, and affective device. It is in-frame, out-of-frame, in our memories, in the room, and elsewhere. Outside of film, our relationship to sound in our daily lives can be cultivated and honed to be more receptive to our own world—which, in turn, informs our experience of cinema. This course will cover a brief history of sound in film, from its early days to the advent of digital technology, while emphasizing its ever-continuing role in shaping narrative, emotional, and cognitive experience. Through a combination of lectures, readings, screenings, and hands-on group conferences, students will explore the mutable relationship of sound, film, and everyday life; the philosophy of sound; and the phenomenological aspects of auditory perception in both cinematic and everyday contexts. We will have short written assignments critiquing the use of sound in film from in-class screenings and a final, more substantial, writing assignment that critiques one of those films through the lens of sound using selected essays/texts from class readings. Hands-on group conferences will include making field recordings as a group that function as reflexive exercises or punctuations for our lectures about sound and image.

They say, “Producing is like trying to build a house of cards in a wind tunnel when someone hands you a stick of crazy glue and turns the lights off.” In fact, the producer is the “visionary”—typically, the one to initiate, develop, nurture, and shepherd a project, step-by-step, from its inception to its completion. Bringing all of the project’s elements into existence while being the critical glue that holds everything together, the producer knows how to “turn the lights on.” Being a producer is a magical journey of discovery: learning what stories are important to you, discovering the best way to tell them, and defining why you must be the one to bring a story to life. These are the essential pillars of producing. This immersive course will provide filmmakers, directors, screenwriters, actors, or any interested student a real-world look “under the hood” into the fundamentals of creative producing—providing a comprehensive understanding of the pivotal role that the creative producer plays in the dynamic and ever-changing world of film and television. Taught through the lens of what one (or a small army of producers) actually does, this course will demystify and explore the role of the producer on a feature or on a short film, documentary, television, animated, or digital project from the moment of creative inspiration through project delivery—defining what it means to “produce.” Working individually and in teams, students will “produce” semester group projects and engage in discussions, theoretical exploration, practical workshops, and exercises that will simulate real-world producing scenarios, as they develop essential skills crucial for success in the producing field. Topics covered will include development, preproduction, production, and postproduction; collaborating with writers, directors, actors, and crew; script breakdown, scheduling, budgeting, financing, distribution, script coverage; and best producing practices. This course will offer students a chance to explore the role of the producer and learn invaluable creative perspectives and industry insights, as students gain the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the multifaceted landscape of producing. Workshops and intimate conversations with working artists from both in front of and behind the camera will allow students opportunities to engage with creatives active in the field. Course objectives will include developing a holistic understanding and fundamental knowledge of the producing process; gaining a unique window into the importance of, and mechanics pertaining to, the producing discipline; and assembling an essential toolkit for creating and seeking opportunities in the filmmaking, television, and moving-image arts worlds. 

The first step to getting any project made is having the goods—a screenplay, an original television pilot script, episodes of a digital series, a short film script, a documentary treatment or proposal—and then developing a rock-solid pitch. By asking important questions—What is your story? To what kind of viewer will it appeal? Is it practical? Has it been done before? What makes your project unique? Why am I the right person to tell this story? This course will introduce students to the fundamentals and practicalities of development and pitching. Through a collaborative workshop process and by using their existing scripts and projects, students will engage in table reads, script analysis, and verbal and written pitch exercises. Students will learn about and create the elements that will make their particular projects and stories resonate and become marketable. Through this process, students will also learn how to develop a project into a pitch package and how to pitch that project and engage with the gatekeepers of the myriad platforms where audiences seek stories on screen. Course work is designed to guide students in how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas, scripts, treatments, and projects and to explore what platforms may best suit their project and why. Guest workshops with industry professionals include writer pitches and understanding talent representation in the entertainment industry. The semester’s work will culminate in a final pitch presentation—an essential skill for all writers, filmmakers, directors, and producers. Whether pitching a colleague to collaborate on your project or pitching a studio or network to finance your project, students will learn how to ensure that a script or project is ready to pitch, how to understand studio and network needs, how to establish industry contacts, how to be a skilled communicator, how to understand and grapple with changing audience tastes, and, overall, how to sell an idea. Students must have a completed script or treatment for which they wish to develop a pitch.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of recording sound for film and moving images. We will explore the vital role of the sound recordist in capturing clean dialogue and immersive environmental sounds. Through hands-on demonstrations and active participation, students will learn techniques to record high-quality sound, both on and off the film set, with available equipment while emphasizing the essential connection between sound and images. Class lessons will be supplemented with texts, films, and imageless soundscape screenings to bring the conceptual into the technical, as we form our understanding of recorded sounds.

Film is a language that most of us, from a very young age, have learned to “read” through immersion. This course is designed to help students deepen this “literacy,” as well as to learn how to speak the film language for themselves and in collaboration with peers. The seminar will be structured as a crash course in filmmaking that emphasizes a “learning-by-doing” approach. Students will regularly be assigned creative assignments of conceiving, writing, preproducing, shooting, editing, and postproducing various film exercises. Much of the creative work will be done outside of class time. In class, a workshop environment will engage us in screenings, discussions, critiques, revisions, and re-edits of those exercises. Working in groups—in an ever-shifting relation of creative roles and authorship—will afford students the support and resources to explore increasingly complicated film projects. We will engage firsthand in both the problems and pleasures of one of the most highly collaborative art mediums.

This course will be an intensive, hands-on workshop that will immerse students in all aspects of film production, focusing on cinematography and lighting for the screen. In addition to covering camera operation and basic lighting techniques, students will explore composition, color palettes, and application of a visual style to enhance the story. The course will revolve around weekly exercises, followed by creating and producing original work; work will be discussed and notes incorporated into the next project. As part of conference work, in addition to the work completed during class times, students will be required to produce a short project incorporating elements discussed throughout the semester. Students will develop, write, shoot, edit, and screen a final project by the end of the term. By the end of the course, students should feel confident to approach a film production project with the expertise to take on introductory and assistant positions with the potential for growth.

This course will present the basics of cinematography and film production; students will explore cinematography as an art of visual storytelling. The cinematographer plays a critical role in shaping the light and composition of an image and capturing that image for the screen. Students will investigate the theory and practice of this unique visual language and its power as a narrative element in cinema. In addition to covering camera operation, students will explore composition, visual style, and the overall operation of lighting and grip equipment. Classmates will work together on scenes that are directed and produced in class and geared toward the training of set etiquette, production language, and workflow. Work will include the re-creation of classic film scenes, with an emphasis on visual style. Students will discuss their work and give feedback that will be incorporated into the next project. For conference work, students will be required to produce a second scene re-creation, incorporating elements discussed throughout the term. Students will outline projects, draw floor plans, edit, and screen the final project for the class. This is an intensive, hands-on workshop that will immerse students in all aspects of film production. By the end of the course, students should feel confident to approach a film production project with enough experience to take on introductory positions with the potential for growth. 

Film has become one of the most dominant forms of visual media and creative expression. This seminar for the budding director will first focus on the filmmaking fundamentals that every filmmaker needs to know in order to tell an effective story on screen: basic filmmaking terms, crew positions, camera operation, shot angles and composition, camera movement, basic lighting, sound recording, and editing. Students will also learn how to create shot lists, floor plans, and other important tools necessary for a successful shoot. Initially, solo shooting assignments will be given, allowing students to begin to develop their own cinematic voice. Because collaboration is key in filmmaking, students will also be divided into small groups for several weekly assignments, providing the opportunity to serve in various roles on the crew. By the end of the course, students will acquire the skills needed for creating compelling cinematic work both on their own and with others. 

This course will introduce students to all aspects of filmmaking, from conceiving a script through exhibition of the final work. In fall, students will focus on screenwriting, writing short scripts that they will then produce and direct in spring. Simultaneously, students will learn how to use filmmaking equipment and editing software and utilize those skills in a series of short, targeted video exercises. Those exercises will not only familiarize students with the gear at their disposal but also will introduce students to concepts of visual storytelling (e.g., where to put the camera to tell the story). In spring, the course will focus on preproduction and previsualization of students' conference films. Students will learn how to craft shot lists, floor plans, look books, and other tools to help them organize their film shoots. Students will practice directing actors and finding a method for effective communication with their cast. Students will also learn some basic production-management skills, such as breaking down scripts for production and scheduling. After shooting their conference films, students will workshop their rough cuts in the classroom and fine-tune their edits in preparation for the final class: the screening!

In this course, students will conceive a short film from its very basis to its final completion. In fall, we will explore a creative and deep examination of the foundations and processes of writing with images and sounds. The course will provide a path to a certain type of sensitivity that will help writers create not just the screenplay for the course but also contribute to all of their screenplays to follow. What are the fundamental skills that we need for writing a film? What is the observation period in which artists need to participate to successfully translate their ideas into words? The script is a descriptive representation of the images and sounds that the writer has created in their imagination—beginning with the construction of an image that nests a story and exploring its possible forms and shapes, imagining characters from the inside outward, and then situating them in the image to let them grow. In spring, we will explore all areas of staging and styles to digest information within a script—from the very first impression of our story, through the actual image, until the editing. Working with each other on projects in a constructive and meaningful way and exploring an audiovisual style, the course will provide interaction and exposure to a wide range of types of film styles, from small to large productions. Guiding questions will include: How do we understand the core of our image? How do we see scripts from a directing point of view? How is the image able to transmit emotions and thoughts? How can we develop critical and well-formulated thoughts of a film idea and expand our personal visual research? 

This video-production seminar will explore, in depth, the rich world of film/video making as artistic expression. Students will complete a series of assignments and short films through lecture, discussion, and screenings of media, including artist interviews, work, readings, and visits. The course will explore moving-image forms and styles that blur the boundaries of narrative, poetic, and abstract filmmaking. There is, by definition, no formula for this kind of work; rather, this course will introduce the language and techniques of film production alongside strategies for the use of film and audio design as creative expression. In this fast-paced course, we will direct concerns to an exploration of the relationship to the aesthetics, politics, and language of filmmaking in its broadest context. We will work on concept development, visual planning, and production pathways. Frequent discussions about student-produced work and about the work of professional artists will broaden the understanding and appreciation of experimental film and will expand creative boundaries. In this context, we will analyze the pioneering work of many experimental film/video artists, including Tacita Dean, Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Colburn, Bill Fontana, Nigel Ayers, and Young-Hae Chang, among others.

In this course, students will produce a semester-long work of nonfiction film either emerging from or creatively activating archival materials. Students will engage with scholarly and creative works that pose a series of complex questions regarding archival ownership and access, power, appropriation, and the possibilities for individual and collective transformation. The practice of making new films from recycled fragments of history opens exciting opportunities for revisiting past events. Crucially, it also invites us to reflect critically on the histories of image making and to ask ourselves how we, as artists, negotiate our place within the archive and within history while also approaching the work with rigor. Students will explore a variety of sources and methodologies for this work, including compilation, found-footage and other remix practices, appropriation, speculative histories, home movies, ephemera, embodiment, memes, and fiction films. Along with producing a short film/video, students will gain practical skills for working effectively with archives, librarians, and other rights holders, as well as navigating issues around fair use and copyright.

Picture this: Your favorite novel has never been made into a movie, a little-known historical figure is your personal role model, or a relative’s journey of survival fascinates you. These are some of the preexisting sources that inspire creatives to write movies. Students will develop feature-length screenplays working from preexisting materials, including novels, biographies, historical incident, and true crime. From pitching ideas, detailed outlining, and creating mood boards in order to develop cinematic storytelling skills, this course will take students through the process of distilling the preexisting material into a three-act narrative structure. We will explore elements of screenwriting—including story structure, character development, visual storytelling, and point of view—in order to expand and deepen the writer’s craft. Students will develop their screenplays in an intimate workshop, where work will be shared and critiqued in a safe and constructive atmosphere. Conference work will include customized instruction, such as preparatory writing assignments, watching films, and assigned readings.

"To make a great film, you need three things—the script, the script, and the script." —Alfred Hitchcock

The world’s directors are in agreement—a solid screenplay is the foundation of any great film. This course is designed to help the beginner screenwriter find their voice as a film artist using the written language of visual storytelling. Students will learn how to write narrative screenplays with an eye toward completing a feature-length work. The course will cover basics of format and style, with weekly assignments aimed at developing students’ screenwriting muscles. In fall, students will write scenes and short screenplays; plus, students will learn about structuring feature-length work. Students will “pitch” ideas and rigorously outline their stories. In spring, students will write their feature-length screenplay. The pages that they present will be “table-read,” and students will receive critical feedback for future revisions. By the conclusion of the course, students will have completed a first draft of their screenplay.

In fall, we will practice the fundamental skill of successful television writers—the ability to craft entertaining and compelling stories for characters, worlds, and situations created by others. Though dozens of writers may work on a show over the course of its run, the “voice” of the show is unified and singular. The best way to learn to write for television is to draft a sample episode of a preexisting show, known as a “spec script.” Developing, pitching, writing, and rewriting stories hundreds of times, extremely quickly, in collaboration and on tight deadlines is what television staff writers do every day, fitting each episode seamlessly into the series as a whole in tone, concept, and execution. In fall, students will be introduced to these fundamental skills, working step-by-step through the writing of their own spec script for an ongoing scripted television series, effectively taking students from premise lines, through the outline/beat sheet, to writing a complete draft of a full teleplay for a currently airing show. In conference, students will work on deepening characters, understanding dramatic and comedic techniques, and developing additional components of their portfolios. Students are expected to have an extensive working knowledge across many genres of television shows that have aired domestically and internationally during the past 25-30 years. Students are also expected to be committed to developing work from concept through premise lines, beat sheets, and outlines—with multiple drafts of each—and with extensive peer collaboration and instructor "green light" before writing script pages. In spring, the course will build on fundamentals learned in fall, this time with the focus on creating new work for original television pilots. Students will be expected to enter the spring with a completed 8-12 page outline for their original show’s pilot story, which will be revised and turned into an original one-hour or half-hour show. Focusing on engineering story machines, we will intend to power their characters and situations with enough conflict to generate episodes over many years. In conference, students may wish to begin to develop character descriptions and pieces of a series pitch for their show or to work on previously developed material. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a first draft of material needed for professional portfolios.

The goal of this course is to develop, write, and workshop a short screenplay of up to 15 pages. Students will pitch stories in an open, roundtable process that will provide an opportunity to understand the potential and feasibility of proposed ideas. The course will explore the elements of screenwriting—including story structure; character development through action, behavior, and dialogue; visual storytelling; and point of view—in order to expand and deepen the writer’s narrative craft. Readings of the work in progress, followed by critique and discussion of the work, will be scheduled. The course will culminate in a full table-read of each screenplay, a process that allows the writer to hear their work read aloud by classmates, assuming the roles of actors, leading to a final production-ready draft. For conference work, students may choose between developing another idea for a short script or long-form screenplay.

In a world filled with moving images, we are all highly capable spectators as well as screenwriters. In this course, we will deepen and complement our existing knowledge of the cinematic medium, challenge our assumptions, and experiment with new ways of conceiving and making cinema. This course will explore a creative and deep examination of the foundations and processes of writing with images and sounds, unveiling the knowledge that students already have and working from there. The course will provide a path to a certain type of sensitivity, which will help writers create not just the screenplay for this course but also contribute to all of their screenplays to follow. Understanding the capacity of the medium will be the most important course objective. Introducing a variety of ways in which film can be made and seen—from contemporary to classical screenwriting sensitivities and from European to Latin American filmmaking—the idea will be to expand our knowledge of the variety and range of films beyond the most mainstream productions. What are the fundamental skills needed for writing a film? What is the time of observation that writers need in order to be able to translate their ideas into words? The script is a descriptive representation of the images and sounds that the writer has created in their imagination, beginning with the construction of an image that nests a story and exploring its possible forms and shapes, imagining characters from the inside outward, and then situating them in the image to let them grow; in other words, to be able to pack entire worlds of thought, feeling, and imagination into the writing of scenes.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other "-ollywoods" around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and United States film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments.

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the "working girl" has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, we will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio's divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

Step behind the camera and discover the world of cinematic storytelling. This immersive course is designed for aspiring filmmakers ready to bring their creative visions to life. From crafting powerful scripts to directing with confidence, students will gain essential skills in screenwriting, visual storytelling, and working with actors. Through hands-on exercises, scene breakdowns, and collaborative filmmaking projects, students will learn to shape compelling narratives and discover their own creative voice. No prior experience is required—just the courage to tell your story on the big screen. Because of the workshop nature of this course, we will meet once a week for three hours. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, students will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio's divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

At a time when digital, three-dimensional (3D) space has saturated our visual vocabulary in everything from design and entertainment to gaming, now more than ever it is important to explore the interface of this space and find methods for unlocking its potential. This will be an introductory course for Maya, the industry-standard 3D modeling and animation software. We will learn the fundamental approaches to environment building, 3D modeling, character creation, character rigging, and keyframe animation. This course will also provide a comprehensive understanding of the important process of rendering, using texturing, lighting, and staging. We will explore how all of these processes may culminate in narrative-based animations, alongside how 3D constructions can be exported into everything from film projects to physical media. Great emphasis will be placed on experimentation in navigating between digital and physical processes. Exercises and assignments will be contextualized through lectures and with readings of both historical and contemporary creators in the field.

This course will analyze children’s media, specifically preschool media through middle school, using cognitive and developmental psychology theory and methods. We will examine specific educational television programs with regard to cognitive and social developmental issues related to family life, peer relationships, and education issues. Because media has an enormous impact on children’s behavior, this has increasingly become a subject of interest among researchers and the public. This course will address that interest by applying cognitive and developmental psychological research and theories for the development and production of educational media. In addition, the course will help identify essential elements that determine the positive and negative qualities of media for children. Finally, the course will examine and evaluate how psychological theories and frameworks can guide the successful production of children’s media (e.g., social cognitive theory). Projects and assignments will include weekly class discussions on peer-reviewed journal articles, watching television programs, group preschool television pitchbook preparation, child observations interacting with screens, and media artifact critiques, as assigned.  

Students will delve into the fundamentals of social media from both creator and user perspectives. This course will offer an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history and evolution of social-media platforms and their impact on cognition, mental health, and knowledge acquisition. Through a combination of psychological journal articles and mass-communication resources, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how social media influences and shapes contemporary life, making them feel knowledgeable and informed. Topics covered will include influencer culture, the 2024 election, and the effects of social media on children and adolescents, among other topics. In group projects, students will design influencer pages from conception to execution, incorporating lessons on strategic content creation, audience engagement, and ethical considerations. By integrating theory with practical application, this course will offer a nuanced view of social media’s role in modern society and will equip students with the skills to effectively navigate and contribute to this dynamic digital landscape and study its effects on its use and digital safety.

This course will survey visual forms of expression across Latin America that record history and represent cultural memories, struggles, and identities. By approaching material sources, students will broaden their comprehension skills and activate discourse production to engage critically in oral and written discussions about historical and social challenges. Among other sources, we will address political violence and resistance through comics such as El Síndrome Guastavino and Violencia política en el Perú, films such as Nostalgia de la luz and La noche de los 12 años, and arpilleras textile art. As students are introduced to Mexican muralism in the 20th century, they will broaden their understanding by analyzing contemporary expressions of street art and graffiti in Brazil and Cuba. Students will also learn about the cholets, Andean architecture from El Alto, and floating houses across delta rivers and lakes. Alongside photography, we will explore the use of body art, from the funerary rituals of Indigenous Selk'nam to Afro-Caribbean masquerades, Mara gang tattoos, and feminist activism. In this seminar, students will examine material culture to deepen their understanding of discursive structures such as description, exposition, narration, comparison, and argumentation. Students will also enhance their Spanish language skills by expanding their vocabulary and effectively applying linguistic and grammatical resources. Throughout the course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop written and oral communication skills in Spanish, as well as critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Museo de El Barrio, Institute for Latin American Art, Hispanic Society of America, and Bronx Museum of the Arts. In addition to class time, students will attend a weekly conversation session with a language tutor. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

This course will examine films produced in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 40 years that contributed to their nations’ collective memory, history, and cultural identity. Students will watch short and full-length feature films, ranging from melodrama to documentary and passing through thriller and romance. We will analyze how Luis Puenzo, Andrés Wood, and Mariano Barroso employed four areas of cinema to construct and visualize a collective memory after the atrocities resulting from the dictatorial regimes in Argentina, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, respectively. The course will also explore how cinema was utilized to recuperate and disseminate cultural identity and history in Peru, Honduras, and Puerto Rico. In this discussion-based seminar, students will learn a basic technical language to offer pointed criticism about films produced in Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean. Students will also delve into the existing scholarship regarding memory, history, and nationalism to think critically about the narratives that they will encounter. Through advanced grammar review and weekly conversation sessions—in small groups with the language assistant—students will further hone their communication skills in Spanish. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within the Americas? The field of speculative fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horror by studying Merla-Watson and Olguín and to criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas by studying Colanzi. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of fiction—such as space-time travel, horror, robots, alternative realities, zombies, and genetics—they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje. In this advanced seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of contemporary speculative fiction in multiple forms, such as literature, comics, film, and performance within the United States-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. Topics studied may include: from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to her theory on Queer Futurities and from critical race theory to movies such as La Llorona, Juan de los muertos, and Sleep Dealer. This trajectory will also range from mainstream franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, to superheroes depiction in El Alto and Tierra del Fuego. We will focus on transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán and artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Edgar Clement. We will also reflect on Futurisms made by mestizos, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbeans while assessing the scopes of climate change and environmental crisis within these communities. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Center for Fiction, Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and Museum of the Moving Image. Sources will be in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, while class discussions and assignments will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. Students will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Using small, hands-on projects, this project aims for digital and computational literacy in interactive and installation art. Discussions and prompts survey foundational concepts of these new art forms, including noise, feedback, emergence, and generative artificial intelligence. This project is required for first-year students in architecture, drawing, new genres, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. In fall and spring, students will meet weekly as a group; corequisite First-Year Studies ARTS course.

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. We will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice.

This course is designed for seniors committed to deepening their artmaking practice over an extended period. Students will maintain individual studio spaces and are expected to work independently, creatively, and critically—challenging both themselves and their peers to explore new ways of thinking and making. The course will include prompts that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to art and culminates in a solo gallery exhibition during the spring, accompanied by a printed book documenting the show. Students will engage in regular critiques with visiting artists and faculty; discuss readings and a range of artists; visit galleries and studios; and participate in the Visual Arts Lecture Series, a program of lectures given by prominent contemporary artists and held at Sarah Lawrence College. Beyond studio work, students will develop skills in presenting their work—including writing artist statements and exhibition proposals, interviewing artists, and documenting their art. A series of professional-practice workshops will further prepare students for life beyond college.

This course will experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing, as material, the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists reviewed will include John Cage, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. We will review dialogues and movements introducing performance art, such as art interventions, sculpture, installation art, institutional critique, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, Dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and dance/movement. Students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, and improvisation—thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance art genre.

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read several types of narratives—children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, and graphic novels—trying our own written hand at many of these styles. Readings will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students might create graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures, as examples of past imaginations. This course will be especially suited to students with an interest in another artistic form or a body of knowledge that they would like to make accessible to nonspecialists.