Department of Cinematic Arts
the
department of
cinematic arts
people, faculty
Core Faculty
For a quick listing of hours and faculty contact information: Contact Listing, Fall 2009
Associate Professor and Chair Susan Dever (Ph.D., Stanford University). In 2003 Susan authored Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamérica (published through SUNY ). In her time at the Department of Cinematic Arts she has added tremendous resources to students, faculty and the inner-department film library holdings with her extensive kowledge in Latin American Cinema as well as current explorations of history-making and cultural productions in Tibet, specifically the history of TIbetan Buddhism in the land and as it is lived through this diasporic population. In addition to her efforts as the Chair of the Department (which comes with a mountain of paperwork and oppourtunities) she has been sitting at her own writing desk working on another book, but this time a novel. susandev@unm.edu
Guggenheim-winning Associate Professor Nina Fonoroff (M.F.A., San Francisco Art Institute), having joined the Department in spring 1999, earned and took a well-deserved sabbatical in spring 2007. While in residency at the Harwood in Taos, she exhibited her multi-layered films and collage art on paper. There she began experimenting with monotypes. The Taos News published a review of her outstanding accomplishments in its February 8-14 issue. Winning a second residency at the Ucross Foundation in Montana, she continued with a new effort: Disenchanted is also funded in part by a grant earned from the New Mexico/New Visions Contract Award. She’ll screen work in progress in Albuquerque this fall as part of her grant responsibilities. All Fonoroff’s etched and painted celluloid art, including forty-minute films from The Accursed Mazurka to Half-Mask (plus some dozen shorts)and a growing collection of hand-made books with pages rendered in pastels and collage, regards intersections of personal and social dimensions. As revealed in an Albuquerque Arts piece (May 2007 interview by fellow experimental filmmaker Bryan Konefsky), Fonoroff suggests that “‘alternative work’ continues to remind us of the medium’s mechanical, chemical, and aesthetic origins, pointing to what film might have been” had cinema not become commercialized. Her moving image art has screened at venues from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to The Learning Channel.
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Bryan
Visiting Professor Caroline Hinkley (MFA, California Institute of the ARts; MFA Claremont Graduate School) is an internationally-regarded artist/scholar whose teaching and expositions encompass film theory, motion and still photography (digital and conventional), immersive spaces (including museums, sacred spaces, and the "elsewhere" of exile). Visiting spring term from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, Associate Professor Hinkley has recently received grants from the Icelandic Visual Arts Association, linking her current photographic art with on-going explorations of the Himalayas. She anticiplates a solo show at the Indiana Museum of Art. chinkley@unm.edu
Lecturer and Video Artist Bryan Konefsky continues to teach, in addition to CA and Freshman Learning courses, “Experimental Film and Video,” a critical studies offering, every summer for the Film and Digital Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz. His own experimental video art attracts local and national attention, not only as recognized by a stream of grants and awards—including a 2007 McCune Foundation Grant to promote his second annual “Experiments in Cinema,” a showcase of (inter)national film and video curated through a new Konefsky course linked to his community service organization, Basement Films (dedicated to micro cinema)—but also as hailed by the near-dozen festivals screening his work around the country. This year Chicken Delight and I Yam What I Yam traveled to the Sponto in Venice, California, while the Athens 34th Video Festival and the 20th Annual Dallas Video Festival also screened that first piece, and New Genre Festival of Tulsa showed the second. I’m in the Mood was a hit in San Francisco at the New Nothing Cinema and at Studio 27, and the video also reaped praise in Flint, Michigan at the Institute for the Arts. Konefsky curated a New Mexico film program at the Millennium Film Workshop in New York City, where Anthology Film Archives treated his work to a retrospective. As Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan in 2007, Konefsky will enjoy the same honor this year as a University of Wisconsin Visiting Artist. In addition he earned a CFA Creative Works Grant for travel to attend the Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Ontario. He returned home to continue serving on the board of the New Visions/New Mexico Filmmakers’ Contract Award Program.
Part-Time Lecturers
Stephanie Becker (Ph.D., University of New Mexico) focuses primarily on Latin American literature and film. Receiving her doctorate in Spanish with a minor in film studies, in 2003, Stephanie has been teaching in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for the past year, and is joining us to teach Latin American Film. sbecker@unm.edu
Teresa Cutler -Broyles (M.A., University of New Mexico) is a multi-tasking professional screenwriter, journalist, and award-winning short fiction writer who has written scripts for Hollywood and worked with documentary filmmakers in New Mexico. she is currently in pre-production on two documentaries, a staff member of the Screenwriting Conference in Santa Fe, and working on a Ph.D. in American Studies. Her book, A Dream that Keeps Returning, is a series of travel essays that explore "otherness" and like in Italy. She has worked with the College of Fine Arts' Cinematic Arts Department since 2002. teresa_cutler@comcast.net
Melissa Henry (M.A., University of New Maryland, College Park) is an award-winning video-maker and scholar with extensive experience from theater production to journalism. Having taught "Intro to Film" and "American Indians in Films" at UNM, this CEO of Red Ant has recently captured the New Mexico/New Visions Contract award for "Blue Heeler," now in production. National Geographic's "All Roads Program" features the former Sundance Fellow's moving-image art in numerous mahenry@unm.edu
Michael Kamins (M.A., University of New Mexico) is a documentary filmmaker and Executive Producer at KNME-TV. Through PBS, his work has been shown nationally around the world, including such venues as the Latino Film Festival held at the SMithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. An Emmy Award winner, he has been a member of our adjunct production faculty since 1989. mkamins@kmne.org
Matthew McDuffie (M.A., University of New Mexico) is an Adjunct Instructor and a working, professional screenwriter. He is the author of numerous scripts for a variety of production companies including Eddie Dodd (Columbia Television), Fruitcake Weather (United Artists), A Cool, Dry Place (Twentieth-Century Fox), Eulogy for Joseph Way (Warner Brothers), and The Hungry Earth (HBO), among others. A graduate of UNM’s Department of Theatre, McDuffie’s courses serve a wide audience. buzzblanco@comcast.net
Carl J. Mora Carl J. Mora (Ph.D., University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa) is the author of Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896-2004 (third edition, 2005), the most widely used English-language reference book on Mexican film. He has written numerous articles on Mexican, Spanish, and other national and genre cinemas. Mora has served since 1991 on the Editorial Board of Film Historia (at the Centre for Cinematic Research, University of Barcelona). He has also designed and refurbished courses in our Cine Latino Series, including 2007’s new “Contemporary Spanish Cinema,” a provocative complement to his previous “Films of Pedro Almodóvar," and created a new course, "Classic Italian Cinema", in 2008. He is again offering "Contemporary Spanish Cinema" in Spring 2009. gigicarl@swcp.com
Becky Peterson (M.F.A., Mills College) received her degree in poetry-writing and in completing her Ph.D. in literature at the University of New Mexico. She is writing an interdisciplinary dissertation about several early-twentieth century women artists--filmmakers, poets, craft practicioners--who paid serious attention to clothing and costuming. In addition to her research on different forms of visual culture, she studies the political and socail effects of humor and comedy. Publications are forthcoming int he journal Arizona Quarterly and in the edited collections Habit of Being: Clothing and Identity (University of Minnesota Press). bpeter02@unm.edu