Three dozen emerging artists will take part in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Artist Academy on October 1 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. The initiative offers an immersive creative experience for selected up and coming filmmakers, tapping into both the Lincoln Center and New York film community for a day-long schedule of talks and case studies designed to inspire participants' artistic instincts.
Presenters at this year's Artist Academy include filmmakers from the 51st New York Film Festival. Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu's latest film When Evening Fall on Bucharest or Metabolism is in the festival's Main Slate. London-based filmmaker Joanna Hogg's three feature films are screening in this year's Emerging Artist sidebar along with Mexico City-based director Fernando Eimbcke. Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster produced and directed American Promise, which is part of NYFF51's Official Selection. Their documentary follows the 12-year journey of two African-American families pursuing the promise of opportunity through the education of their sons.
Nico Muhly has composed a wide scope of work for ensembles, soloists and organizations including the American Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony, countertenor Iestyn Davies, violinist Hilary Hahn, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, Paris Opéra Ballet, soprano Jessica Rivera, and designer/illustrator Maira Kalman. He has also composed music for film, including The Reader (2008), Margaret (2011), and the upcoming Kill Your Darlings (2013).
This year's Artist Academy members:
Mauricio Arango
Mauricio Arango was born in Colombia and lives and works in New York. He is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum (New York, 2007), was a resident at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg (2005), Austria and earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota (2003). His films and works have been shown in multiple festivals and screened in more than twenty countries including most recently New Directors/New Films at the Lincoln Film Society and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kino Der Kunst in Munich and VideoBrasil in Sao Paulo.
New Directors/New Films 2012
Josh Bernard
Josh Bernhard is a producer, writer, editor and director. A native New Yorker, Josh produced his first television series for Binghamton University's student-run television station in 2004. After writing and directing a no-budget feature called 'The Lionshare', Josh decided to focus on the exploding arena of web content. His first foray into new media was producing and writing the serial drama Pioneer One, which went on to win Best Drama Pilot at the 2010 New York Television festival. The six-episode first season was recognized by the Webby Awards for writing and excellence in drama. Today, Josh is continuing to develop content for the web and any other medium that will facilitate his love for serialized storytelling.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Molly Bernstein
Molly Bernstein is the producer and director of Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, a feature documentary that premiered at the NYFF and is now in theatrical and digital distribution. She has written and directed profiles of figures in the arts for Sundance Channel and AMC, and has edited numerous documentaries including: Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About (American Masters) and Witnesses to the Twentieth Century, written by Elaine May. Molly has recently made many short films about contemporary artists and art collectors for Particle Productions. She has an MFA in film from Columbia University.
New York Film Festival 2012
Shubhashish Bhutiani
Shubhashish Bhutiani was born in Calcutta, India on July 20th, 1991. A 2013 graduate of The School of Visual Arts film program, he grew up in a small Himalayan town in India. Bhutiani began his film career as an assistant on the critically acclaimed director Vishal Bharadwaj's film, Kaminey, and has worked on commercials for major international brands. To date, Bhutiani has directed multiple short films, music videos, and theatre. His thesis film, KUSH, made its world premiere at the 70th Venice International Film Festival. He is currently in development on his debut feature film.
Peter Bolte
Peter Bolte is a NYC-based, award winning artist and filmmaker. He has directed the features All Roads Lead and Dandelion Man, several short films, music videos and spec commercials. Recent credits also include being cinematographer on the documentaryCasting By (HBO Documentaries). Peter has exhibited his films and paintings at numerous venues including: Vancouver International Film Festival, St. Louis International FF, Woodstock FF, San Francisco DocFest, Nantucket FF, LA ShortsFest, Anthology Film Archives, Issue Project Room, Galapagos Art Space, HereArt, Festival Electrochoc, Montréal Fringe Festival, Rugby Museum and Art Gallery, Burning Man, T.K. Lang Gallery Vienna and Barb's Performance Space.
New York Film Festival 2012
Francesca Coppola
Originally from Milan, Italy, Francesca Coppola is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Her short film “Flamingos” premiered at the MoMa and Lincoln Center as part of New Directors/New Films and is currently touring festivals. She is now working on a new script and teaching film to a group of homeless youth. Francesca is a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. During her downtime, she also writes and performs poetry.
New Directrors/New Films 2012
Almitra Corey
Almitra Corey has been working in film and television since 2005. Her experience has been primarily in the art department, including for film: Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III, and John Cameron-Mitchell's Rabbit Hole. For television: How To Make It In America, Life On Mars and Gossip Girl. She has also produced short films that include Joan's Day Out and Henley. Her role model is Polly Platt.
Tom Donahue
Donahue's latest is the feature documentary, Casting By (TIFF, NYFF '12, HBO). He made his feature directing debut with the documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman (Tribeca Film Festival '08, Sundance Channel). As producer, his credits include the feature film Ponies (starring John Ventimiglia and Kevin Corrigan), Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart and Alfredo de Villa’s Washington Heights (Winner, 2002 LAFF Audience Award). He is currently working on Thank You for Your Service, a feature documentary about the mental health crisis in the military and is set to make his narrative directorial debut with the thriller, Beard's Creek.
New York Film Festival 2012
Neil Dvorak
Neil Dvorak was born and raised in the suburbs of NYC. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He loves sushi, bugs, the films of Ken Loach and his favorite book is The Great Gatsby. When he isn't lucky enough to be working on great music videos and animations he's writing his illustrated novel “Easy Pieces”. He is currently adapting the work into a short animation.
New Directors/New Films 2012
Alan Edelstein (Producer/Co-Director)
Alan Edelstein received an Academy Award nomination for his documentary short The Wizard of Strings, a profile of the 1920s string instrumentalist and vaudeville star Roy Smeck. His current project, with Director/Producer Molly Bernstein, is Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2012. He has worked as a writer and producer for Nowak Associates, Great Projects Film Company, and Sundance Channel, among others. Recent projects include a promotional film for Education For Employment, a nonprofit organization addressing the dire unemployment problem among youth in the Middle East and North Africa, shot on location in the West Bank, Jordan, and Yemen. A journalist as well as filmmaker, he has written on arts and culture for publications including The New York Times, the Forward, and Transition.
New York Film Festival 2012
Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott is a writer, director, and producer with an MFA from Columbia University. He works as a producer and editor at Phoenix Media Group in Manhattan. Multifaceted at his core, Elliott has played various roles on numerous films, writing and directing GIONGO and Lucky Duck, acting as a producer on Jiboia and as an assistant to director Gregg Araki on Mysterious Skin. Outside of the production world, he is a skilled book editor, whose most recent work, Children of Wrath by Paul Grossman, earned high praise throughout the publishing world.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Brian Fountain
Brian is a transmedia writer and producer with more than a decade of experience creating projects that transpire across multiple platforms, such as mobile, web and live events. He is an award winning game designer and software developer. He was a co-lyricist and co-composer of the movie Freak Dance which was selected as part of the 2011 Austin Film Festival's Comedy Vanguard Series. He teaches Narrative Design at New York Film Academy. His most recent project CouchCachet was featured in the New York Times, Mashable, Buzzfeed and many other publications, reaching more than 10 million people globally.
Convergence 2012
Vincent Gagliostro
As an original member of the politcal AIDS activist group ACT UP, his graphics defined a movement that he is today a continuing force as both artist and activist. He was noted in New York Magazine (September 30, 1996) for his “make no apologies” style, and identified in that same issue as one of the six most influential players in the gay community. Short films shown in film festivals internationally: Fringe! Gay Film Festival, London; ASVOFF at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as well as in Cannes, Barcelona. Art fairs include, The New York Armory Show; Pulse Art Fair and Scope. He has written and will direct his debut feature film After Louie currently in development.
Ori Dov Gratch
Ori Dov Gratch founded Torch Films along with Tim Hobbs in 2008. Most recently, they produced the feature film “Aquà y Allá (Here and There)”, which won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and premiered in North America at the 50th New York Film Festival. Prior to Torch, Ori worked as an Associate at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong. He was born in Israel and raised in New York, and holds an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from New York University and a BS from Columbia University.
New York Film Festival 2012
Julia Halperin
Julia Halperin co-directed and edited Now, Forager, which premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and New Directors/New Films. The film was included in several best-of-the-year lists, including the Museum of Modern Art’s “Contenders”. Julia and her co-director Jason Cortlund were nominated for a Gotham Award in the Breakthrough Director category. Julia received her B.A. in Theater and Film from Hunter College and her M.F.A in Film/Video Production from the University of Texas. Her short films and video installations have screened widely. She is currently preparing to co-direct La Barracuda, which is a 2013 selection of the Venice Biennale College.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Russell Harbaugh
Russell Harbaugh's short film Rolling on the Floor Laughing played the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and many other festivals around the world including the FSLC/MoMA co-curated New Directors/New Films, Maryland Film Festival, Sarasota International Film Festival, Milano, Warsaw, and others. Harbaugh participated in the 2013 Sundance Screenwriter and Director Labs and received a Sundance Institute Cinereach Feature Film Fellowship with Love After Love, the feature length version of ROFL which he is co-writing with Eric Mendelsohn. The project has also been supported by IFP’s 2013 No-Borders program and was one of four projects chosen for the 2012 Nantucket Screenwriter’s Colony. Harbaugh received his MFA from Columbia University in 2011 and is originally from Evansville, Indiana. He lives in New York.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Johnson Henshaw
Johnson Henshaw is a New York based performance facilitator. He has developed work with New Georges, NYTW, PS122, Dixon Place, the Public, and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. He recently directed and co-produced the web-series Craft and Burn for Meredith Corporation's DIGS YouTube Channel. His first short film is his collaboration with Rachel Cole on Pregnant and Dying. He is currently in post-production for his first feature length comedy.
Tim Hobbs
Tim Hobbs founded Torch Films along with Ori Dov Gratch in 2008. Most recently, they produced the feature film “Aquà y Allá (Here and There)”, which won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and premiered in North America at the 50th New York Film Festival. Prior to Torch, Tim worked as an Associate at The Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles, and in general management in other industries. He was raised in Pittsburgh, and holds an MBA in Finance and Media from New York University and a BA from Emory University.
New York Film Festival 2012
Ellen Houlihan
Ellen Houlihan is an award-winning writer-director whose work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, Brett Ratner's social media channels and MTVu. She won an Emmy at the College TV Awards for a hard-hitting PSA starring standup comic Todd Glass for GLSEN; and is currently touring the film festival circuit with Joan’s Day Out, a 20 minute comedy starring Academy Award-nominated actress Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H), Tara Lynne Barr (God Bless America) and Betsy Franco (Funny or Die). She is currently writing feature film scripts and seeking directing opportunities.
Eline Jongsma & Kel O’Neill
Eline Jongsma & Kel O’Neill are a Dutch-American filmmaking team focused on cross-platform storytelling. They work primarily as a two-person crew. They spent 2010 – 2013 traveling more than 140,000 kilometers through Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas while filming Empire (NYFF51). Before creating Empire, they were US Correspondents for VPRO Television’s award-winning documentary series “Metropolis.” Their journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Vice and The Creators Project. Their installations have been presented by museums, galleries and festivals throughout the world, including: LAFF; IDFA; Apex Art, New York; Stevenson, Cape Town; Khoj, New Delhi; and CBK Zuidoost/Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam.
Convergence 2013
Alexander Kaluzhsky
Alexander Kaluzhsky is a filmmaker, born in Odessa, Ukraine. Under his production company Apropos Films he’s produced the features “The Missing Person”, which premiered at Sundance, and “Weakness” which premiered at the Austin Film Festival. As writer/ director he’s made the short films- “ Arkadya”, a winner at Hammertonail.com’s Short Film Contest judged by Sundance’s Mike Plante, and filmmaker Benh Zeitlin; “The Visitors”, for which he received the 2010 Blueprint Fellowship, and screened at the Santa Fe Museum of Art. He’s currently in pre-production on two feature films, and is the co-founder/curator of Honey Ramka, an artist run gallery space in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Adam Leon
Adam Leon was born and raised in NYC. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania he worked extensively in the New York film industry. His short, Killer, premiered at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center as part of their New Directors/New Films festival. His feature debut, Gimme The Loot, won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW and was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard). It went on to play all over the world and was released theatrically in the U.S. by IFC Films. He is a winner of the Independent Spirit “Someone To Watch” grant award.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Jonathan Lisecki
Jonathan Lisecki is a director, writer, and actor based in New York. Gayby, his feature-film debut, was nominated for Best First Screenplay at the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards. Since premiering at SXSW 2012, Gayby has won eighteen festival awards, was named one of the best films of the year by the Boston Globe, and topped the iTunes independent film chart. Slant called it “universally hilarious,” and the LA Times hailed its “emotional generosity and easy warmth.” Prior work includes the shorts Gayby and Woman in Burka. Lisecki was named one of Out Magazine's 100 Most Compelling People of the year.
Alexander Moors
New Directors/New Films 2012
Terence Nance
Terence Nance is an artist whose practice includes installation, performance, music, and moving images. Terence makes music under the name Terence Etc. His first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, is an IFP Narrative lab alumnus and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film was acquired for theatrical distribution by Variance film, premiered in theaters on April 12th and is available on DVD and Digital release by Cinema Guild October 1st. The album of the same title will be released this year. Terence currently resides in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and is currently developing his sophomore feature, The Lobbyist.
New Directors/New Films 2013
Ben Niles
Ben Niles is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His latest film, “Note By Note (The Making of Steinway L1037),” won top honors at the Sarasota Film Festival, was nominated for an IDA award and selected to the prestigious American Documentary Association, and premiered nationally on PBS. He is currently producing “Some Kind of Spark,” a documentary following kids from underserved communities in a music outreach program at Juilliard. In addition, he is also Co-directing “Still We Rise,” a film that addresses mental health issues in Liberia. A graduate of the University of Georgia at Athens, Ben attended UGA’s prestigious Cortona program, an intensive fine arts study-abroad program located in Cortona, Italy.
Ian Olds
Ian Olds is a director of both narrative and documentary work. Directing credits include the Iraq war doc Occupation: Dreamland (short-listed for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and winner of a 2006 Independent Spirit Award), Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (winner of top jury prizes at Tribeca and Madrid, acquired by HBO and nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism), and the experimental narrative Francophrenia (Abu-Dhabi, Rotterdam, Tribeca, True/False). Olds also edited As I Lay Dying (Cannes 2013, Un Certain Regard) and was recently awarded a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Marc Parees
Marc Parees is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker originally from Emmaus, Pennsylvania. His recent short Little Ones garnered several awards including a Warner Brothers Production Grant through NYU. His other films include WWJD, Saveta’s Gift, and Over There. His award-winning commercial Million in the Mirror for the Avon/Love Army of Women breast cancer initiative aired nationally. Parees worked on the creative team for three NBCUniversal pilots including Smash. After training as a classical ballet dancer and earning a BFA in Drama, leading to ten years of directing innovative theater, Parees completed his MFA in Film at NYU. Parees has four feature screenplays in development with The Southside of Bethlehem targeting production in October 2014.
Matias Pineiro
Matias was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1982. He studied at the Universidad del cine, where he went on to teach Filmmaking and Film History. In 2011, he moved to the U.S. to undertake the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University. Today, he lives in New York under a new fellowship at New York University. Matias’ films include “El hombre robado” (2007), “Todos mienten” (2009), “Rosalinda” (2010) and “Viola” (2012). He is currently beginning the post-production of the third installment of his Shakespearean project, “The Princess of France,” while developing the fourth, “Isabella.”
New Directors/New Films 2012
Shannon Plumb
Shannon Plumb is an accomplished video artist whom has created, produced, and starred in over 200 of her own short films. Her work has been exhibited and screened in countless venues throughout the United States and abroad in England, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan, and China. Her work have been reviewed in such diverse publications as the New York Times, the SF Weekly, Trace, the Village Voice, The LA Times, V Magazine, the New Art Examiner, i-D, and Vogue. Plumb’s cinematic studies of life's various roles unearth the complexities embedded in the ordinary and the extraordinary. From the humble persona of a new mother to iconic figures from the silver screen, she portrays real characters and situations with zest and humor. Inspired by the curious spirit and physical humor of silent film legends such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, hand made props, long takes, stationary camera shots, and elaborate costumes are essential to her work, bringing together the sensibilities of comedy's past with depictions of modern everyday life. It is this convergence of older aesthetics (drawing on silent films) and new themes (about women in modern times) that defines her work.
New Directors/New Films 2012
Pamela Romanowsky
Pamela Romanowsky is a New York-based writer and director. In 2011, Romanowsky won the National Board of Review’s Student Grant Award and NYU’s prestigious Wasserman/King Award for excellence in filmmaking. In 2012, she wrote and directed a piece for Tar (James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jessica Chastain, Zach Braff), a multi-director narrative film based on the life and poetry of CK Williams, which premiered at the Rome International Film Festival and is awaiting a U.S. theatrical release. In 2013, the Sundance Institute selected Pamela as a fellow for its Screenwriting, Directing and Composing/Sound Design Labs with her feature project The Adderall Diaries, based on the bestselling memoir by Stephen Elliott. There, Pamela was selected as the recipient of the Sundance/Indian Paintbrush grant. She studied documentary filmmaking with Barbara Kopple, and narrative filmmaking at New York University’s MFA film program.
Nathan Silver
Nathan Silver graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2005. Since then, he has written and directed four short films and four feature films: The Blind (2009), Exit Elena (2012), Soft in the Head (2013), and Simian (2014). His films have played festivals around the world, including Edinburgh, Vienna, Vancouver, Slamdance, Sarasota, Woodstock, Torino, and BAFICI. Exit Elena opened in New York at the reRun Theatre and received glowing reviews in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice. Recently, Filmmaker Magazine named him “one of the most interesting emerging directors in U.S.indie film.”
Indie Night 2013
Ines and Ena Talakic
Ines and Ena Talakic are co-dircetors from Italy. In 2010 they graduated from the University of Design and Art of Bolzano, Italy. They are classically trained musicians of piano and violin with degrees from the Claudio Monteverdi Music Conservatory in Bolzano (2010). They have given numerous performances around Europe and at the United Nations in New York, and have been mentioned in Vanity Fair Italia, Velvet, Abitare and the Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and Repubblica. Their love of music fed their film passion and they pursued their studies at the Prague Film School and the Stella Adler Acting Conservatory in New York, believing that having a deeper understanding of how actors work would make them better directors. Their short film “The Portrait” played at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. They're currently in the production phase of their feature-length documentary “Fred,” a biopic about one of Hollywood's biggest agents, with Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Irons, Dan Aykroyd and Geoffrey Rush, amongst others. They're also working on their first feature length movie script. Ines and Ena speak Italian, German, English, Croatian, and Spanish. They currently reside in New York.
Mark Thiedeman
Mark Thiedeman studied film and television at New York University and remained in New York for ten years making a series of short films. He relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2010, where he shot his first feature-length project, Last Summer [Outfest, NewFest, Athens International Film Festival, Little Rock Film Festival]. Originally from New Orleans, he typically addresses in his work themes of life in the American South and the effect of Southern values on LGBT individuals.
Andrew Wonder
Director/cinematographer Andrew Wonder got his start producing for MTV at the age of 17. Less than three years later he was accepted into the International Cinematographers Guild attending NYU and shot his first feature film (New Orleans Mon Amour, SXSW ’08) before his 21st birthday. Andrew won an Emmy for directing the 200th Episode of MTV's Made in 2011. The same year his documentary “Undercity” received over 2 million views and landed him on the Today show. As a commercial director Andrew has been featured in American Cinematographer and tapped by filmmakers including Paul Schrader, Antoine Fuqua and Harris Savides, ASC, to implement his unique style of working with digital cameras.
Jeremu Xido
Originally from Detroit, Jeremy graduated cum laude in Painting and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York and trained at the Actor's Studio. Since 2003 he has been the artistic co-director of the performance and film company CABULA6, which was voted “company of the year 2009” by Ballettanz, and awarded “Outstanding Artist of the Year 2010” by the Austrian Ministry of the Arts. CABULA6 has produced and presented work for both film and stage all over the world. Jeremy's film directing credits include the feature documentary Death Metal Angola, the six part Crime Europe series, and the short documentary Macondo in addition to several short fiction films. He is known in Europe as a performance artist with a unique artistic voice and approach to stage and film, blending emotionally gripping personal stories with the larger social contexts within which they emerge. Working as a dancer, actor and filmmaker, he has performed and presented work around the world on stage, TV and in Cinema. He speaks English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese and is based in New York City.
