Research
I am delighted to be working in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa where I teach a combination of critical theory, creative production, and travel courses that promote UT’s commitment to the liberal arts, internationalism, and learning by doing.
Writing
My doctoral dissertation, Rebranding Diversity, uses qualitative methods to critique the intersection of race, gender, and class within advertising agencies. Since coming to UT, I have been invited to present this work to both industrial and academic audiences. For instance, I delivered a commissioned talk entitled The Ghosts of Mad Men at the Sustainability Summit in New York City and published my analysis as a book chapter on how the twin specters of sexism and racism continue to haunt advertising in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, an article on cultural code switching and stereotype threat for the Howard Journal of Communications, and another article on how color-blindness cloaks white opportunity hoarding for tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. I have also written book chapters on media activism movements ranging from the common cause of second-wave feminism and conservative religion for New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, to the fight against draconian copyright regimes that chill free speech for Media Education for a Digital Generation, to how the “KONY 2012” social media campaign became the most viral video in history for Debates for the Digital Age: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Our Online World. I've written on the advantages, challenges, and creative opportunities of being a scholar-practitioner for the Journal of Media Literacy Education and how I conducted ethnographic research for Advertising & Society Quarterly, where I've been a repeat panelist for published conversations on race and brand mascots, the documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, and Pushing Cool, a book about the predatory marketing of menthol cigarettes. The journal and book covers below link to the relevant articles and chapters, which can also be accessed through my digital repository.
FILMS
As a scholar-filmmaker, my creative work asks critical questions about identity, inequality, and memory. Life After Life (2018), a feature-length documentary about physically integrated dance, challenges stereotypes around race, age, and ability. Every Body Dances (2020) extends the accessibility of that project by adding captions and audio description for the hearing and visually-impaired. Salvage (2020), an experimental film about power, aesthetics, and the consequences of taste, revives old objects to critique consumer capitalism's historic asymmetries of gender, ethnicity, and class. Progress (2021) traces the lineage of a mysterious object, reflects on the allure of obsolete tools, takes stock of how far we've come as a society, and asks what has been lost and gained in the process. And Cosmic•Atomic (2022), a 360 video designed for virtual reality headsets, is a remake of my short film Power Trip (2018), an immersive journey across space and time compressing 60 years of scientific imagination. I collaborated with students on most of these films (often sharing camera duties with them), but was the writer/director/editor for all. Together, these films have screened at 57 film festivals all over the world with an average acceptance rate of 15% and an average age of 17 years. In other words, the venues are, as a whole, both highly selective and well established (five of them have been ranked by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the top “50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee”). For visual evidence from these screenings, please see my Film Screening Scrapbook.
My films have also won nine awards including the Art Category at the 6th RATMA International Film Festival in Keighley, England, a Director’s Choice Award at the 40th Thomas Edison Film Festival in Hoboken, NJ, Best Video Essay at the 17th Orlando Film Festival, Special Mention at the 16th DocsMX in Mexico City, Best Short Documentary at the 17th Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, FL, 2nd Place in the New Media Section at the 76th University Film and Video Conference, Best VR at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, and both the audience award and jury award in the immersive category at the 11th CineGlobe Film Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. And two of my films were published in academic journals: Power Trip appears in the 7.2 issue of the [in]Transition Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, the most prestigious journal for scholarly video essays, and Salvage appears in Hyperrhiz 22 along with a colleague’s written essay analyzing the film. For more details, please reference my CV and FilmFreeway profile.
My films have also won nine awards including the Art Category at the 6th RATMA International Film Festival in Keighley, England, a Director’s Choice Award at the 40th Thomas Edison Film Festival in Hoboken, NJ, Best Video Essay at the 17th Orlando Film Festival, Special Mention at the 16th DocsMX in Mexico City, Best Short Documentary at the 17th Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, FL, 2nd Place in the New Media Section at the 76th University Film and Video Conference, Best VR at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, and both the audience award and jury award in the immersive category at the 11th CineGlobe Film Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. And two of my films were published in academic journals: Power Trip appears in the 7.2 issue of the [in]Transition Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, the most prestigious journal for scholarly video essays, and Salvage appears in Hyperrhiz 22 along with a colleague’s written essay analyzing the film. For more details, please reference my CV and FilmFreeway profile.
UNDERGRADUATE
In addition to my own work, I've also supervised and facilitated undergraduate research ranging from summer research fellowships to academic conferences. For instance, I supervised two groups of students presenting honors symposia on campus (featuring documentaries they filmed with me in Ecuador and Morocco, respectively), a student-led panel for Human Rights Day, a pair of students presenting This is My Place at the Butler Undergraduate Research Conference, and the director of Solace in Amal screening his work the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Visions Film Fest & Conference. I also supervised an honors fellowship for Eric Langhoff as part of my first feature documentary, Life After Life. When that film premiered at the 2019 Sarasota Film Festival, it caught the eye of incoming UT student Steven Nye who sought me out for an independent study in support of a feature documentary film he was developing. We worked together through one summer undergraduate research fellowship (SURF), two honors theses courses, and a work-in-progress screening in 2022. This was enough to earn Steven the Charlene A. Gordon Award for Best Film Student at UT. But, even after he graduated with honors and presented his work to legislators in the state capitol during the second annual Florida Undergraduate Research Posters event, we kept working. Several months (and cuts) later, we learned that Losing Grip would have it’s world premiere at the 25th Sarasota Film Festival, a full circle moment for me and an extraordinary achievement for Steven given that the festival only accepted 10% of its 1,500 submissions. Our efforts were featured in SRQ magazine and on the University of Tampa’s LinkedIn and Office of Admissions' Instagram.
I followed a similar path from research project to highly selective film festival premiere with Juliana Kasmanas, a student in my COM 212 Co-creative Documentary Abroad travel course to Mexico. Based on the strength of her honors tutorial, I proposed a panel for the 77th Annual University Film and Video Association (UFVA) entitled Putting Documentary Accountability into Practice: Lessons Learned in the Field and Classroom. The panel was accepted and Julian joined me and the rest of the participants over Zoom to co-present our portion: Co-Creative Production Agreements: How Open-ended Consent Changes the Documentary Production Process. Juliana and her team’s close attention to ethics was matched by their deep commitment to craft. After many rounds of revision, their film, Cadena en Cadena was not only selected by the Americas Film Festival New York (TAFFNY), which only accepted 40 out of 562 submissions (9%), but was also awarded a "Special Mention" in the category of documentary by the jury. With the support of UT’s Honors Program, College of Arts and Letters (CAL), Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (OURI), and International Programs Office (IPO), I was able to take the students and their Mexico-based associate producer (which was important for the co-creative ethos of the course) up to New York City to present the film and accept their award. The reel I made about the experience was reposted on UT’s Instagram. For a Mexican perspective on the project, please see the Na’atik Blog. Another student film from that course, The Guardians, screened for a month at The Exploratorium in San Francisco.
I followed a similar path from research project to highly selective film festival premiere with Juliana Kasmanas, a student in my COM 212 Co-creative Documentary Abroad travel course to Mexico. Based on the strength of her honors tutorial, I proposed a panel for the 77th Annual University Film and Video Association (UFVA) entitled Putting Documentary Accountability into Practice: Lessons Learned in the Field and Classroom. The panel was accepted and Julian joined me and the rest of the participants over Zoom to co-present our portion: Co-Creative Production Agreements: How Open-ended Consent Changes the Documentary Production Process. Juliana and her team’s close attention to ethics was matched by their deep commitment to craft. After many rounds of revision, their film, Cadena en Cadena was not only selected by the Americas Film Festival New York (TAFFNY), which only accepted 40 out of 562 submissions (9%), but was also awarded a "Special Mention" in the category of documentary by the jury. With the support of UT’s Honors Program, College of Arts and Letters (CAL), Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (OURI), and International Programs Office (IPO), I was able to take the students and their Mexico-based associate producer (which was important for the co-creative ethos of the course) up to New York City to present the film and accept their award. The reel I made about the experience was reposted on UT’s Instagram. For a Mexican perspective on the project, please see the Na’atik Blog. Another student film from that course, The Guardians, screened for a month at The Exploratorium in San Francisco.