Faculty
Cari Callis
M.A., University of Illinois at Chicago. Screenwriter, poet, novelist and editor for Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), an NEA funded literary magazine. Has worked on various film productions as a crew member and as a creative consultant. Published in Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Arts and Communication, Wire and 58. She is currently Development Program Director.
Michael Caplan
M.F.A., Northwestern University. Independent filmmaker, director and producer. He is currently completing his second feature length documentary, focusing on a unique magician and his influence on magic performance world-wide. His previous documentary, Stones from the Soil, played on national PBS in 2005 through 2007. In addition, he has produced three independent feature films, which have been distributed internationally, and has directed several award-winning dramatic shorts. He has also taught production at Northwestern University and lectured on story-telling at the University of Chicago. He is currently Associate Chair in the Film and Video Department, overseeing Cinematography and Post Production.
Judd Chesler
Ph.D., Northwestern University. He taught Cinema Studies at Purdue University and later worked in the Chicago film industry as a writer-producer. He has taught at Columbia since 1980 and for the past eight years was Director of the Graduate Program. His credits include producing the video component of the mixed-media performance, “Turn Her White With Stones,” with Jan Erkert Dancers. Recent work includes teaching courses on gender and film and developing performance-based approaches to film directing in the graduate curriculum.
Kevin Cooper
Kevin is currently a tenure track faculty member and Coordinator for the Producing Concentration at Columbia. Last summer, he produced a $2 million Hungarian film called Lora starring Lucia Brawley (World Trade Center) directed by Gabor Herendi. His production company Amarok Productions is actively pursuing a slate of independent and studio projects including: Stardate written and to be directed by Paul Hernandez (Sky High), Instant Karma starring Pierce Brosnan, Dwayne “The Rock”
Johnson, Gene Wilder, Long Hello Short Goodbye by Jeff Vintar (I, Robot), Day of the Dogs with the Broken Lizard Comedy Group (Super Troopers), and others. Prior to forming his current company, Kevin spent six years heading up the Production Division of James Cameron’s Academy Award winning visual effects company, Digital Domain, Inc., where he developed over a dozen different forms of content including the feature film Secondhand Lions starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment. Prior to Digital Domain, Kevin was a studio producer responsible for the development and production of Men of Honor, The Fight Club, and The Thin Red Line. Kevin graduated with an MFA in Producing from UCLA and received his BFA in Film/Video Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His thesis film Red won multiple awards including the Student Academy Awards and the Heartland
Film Festival.
Chris Swider
Chris Swider is a graduate of Columbia College, Chicago, and he holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Directing Program of the Polish National Film School, Lodz, Poland (PWSFTviT). He has made both documentary and narrative films. Mr. Swider is a tenured professor at Columbia College, Chicago where he teaches directing, and he is a producer at BulletProof Film in Chicago. Mr. Swider also works as a script
consultant and continues to write screenplays, both dramas and comedies. Three of his screenplays have been awarded in screenwriting competitions. Most recently, the Houston International Film Festival awarded his screenplay, Peter and the Chrome Plated Fish, the first prize (a Platinum Remi) in the category of "Comedy-Adaptation or Original." The award is named after the painter Frederic Remington. His feature
length documentary, Children in Exile, will premiere at the Globians Film Festival in Potsdam, Germany on August 15, 2007.
Wenhwa Ts’ao
Born and raised in Taiwan, Republic of China, Wenhwa Ts’ao is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has received funding form several organizations: KODAK Faculty Scholars Award, Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts as well as support from the City of Chicago, Columbia College, Appalshop Arts Center and Ilford Imaging. Her short film has been screened in festivals across the country and the world, including Festival de Cannes – Short Film Corner, Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, Festival International de Film de Femmes in Creteil, France, San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, Women in Director’s Chair, Women of Color, Madcat and the Mill Valley International Film Festival in the US, Montreal World Film Festival, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and Victoria Independent film and Videos Festival in Canada, and in traveling festivals and showcases in China, Romania, Mexico, Ecuador and the Netherlands. In addition to her work as an independent filmmaker, Wenhwa is a passionate educator. She is a professor and Graduate Program Director in the Film & Video Department at Columbia College Chicago. Currently Wenhwa is in pre-production on a dramatic feature about human trafficking titled Snakehead. The project has been selected for the Emerging Narrative section during IFP’s Independent Film Week. Also she is in development on another feature script inspired by the historical looting of the Silk Road Buddhist Treasure from 1885 to 1925, and a sci-fi film about a coming-of-age thirteen-year-old cyborg girl.
Sharon Zurek
B.A., Columbia College. Sharon has won funding and a variety of awards for her independent and professional work as a producer, director and editor. As the owner of Black Cat Productions in Chicago, she has edited several independent feature films, including "DEE DEE RUTHERFORD", "DIRTY WORK" (formerly, "SOUTHSIDE"), "RUNAWAY DIVAS", "STRAY DOGS", "CONSTRUCTING MULLIGAN'S STEW", "THE CHAMELEON" and the successful short film, "FLYING". She is also a board member with IFP/Chicago and Chicago Filmmakers as well as actively involved as a
volunteer for Reeling: The Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival.
Ron Falzone
B.A., Columbia College; MFA, Northwestern University. An award-winning
screenwriter and director in theatre and film, he has been responsible for over 70 mainstage theatre productions from Boston to New York to Chicago. The host of “Talk Cinema” screening series, he is a ten-time Artist in Residence at The Ragdale Foundation and a Year 2000 recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Screenwriting as well as a 2006 Finalist Award from the IAC. Ron is currently the coordinator of the Directing concentration and as founder of the Visiting Director Program, he has been responsible for bringing such directors as Harold Ramis, Todd Solondz, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Patrice Chereau, David Gordon Green and Ousmane Sembene for programs in the department.
Tom Fraterrigo
M.F.A., Columbia College. Writer and director, who has worked on both film and stage productions. Freelance documentary producer for City at Peace-New York. Gold Award Winner for the historical feature screenplay, "Huffman Prairie" at the 2006 Houston International Film Festival.
Chap Freeman
M.F.A., University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Has directed films in dramatic, documentary, educational and industrial formats. Documentaries on social ecology and children's prisons. Dramatic screenplays on transcendental science fiction and the midlife crisis in gay men. Research on Westerns, film noir, and the French New Wave. Taught the Visions Project, 1994-2000, a documentary training program for
European students sponsored by Groupement European des Ecoles de Cinema et de Television. Chap is the North American Representative to the Executive Council of CILECT, the world organization of film and television schools.
Karla Rae Fuller
Karla Rae Fuller, Ph.D. Is currently an Associate Professor of the School of Media Arts in the department of Film & Video at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches film history, aesthetics, script analysis and screenwriting in the undergraduate and M.F.A. Graduate programs. She received her Ph.D. From Northwestern University, M.F.A. From Columbia University in New York City and B.A. From Amherst College. Her research interests include racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood films, postwar Japanese cinema and authorship studies. She has presented her work at film conferences both nationally and internationally. She is also published in numerous film journals and has published an essay in the anthology, Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, on the representation of the Japanese in Hollywood films during World War II. She is currently under contract by Wayne State University Press for her manuscript, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film and by University Press of Mississippi for editing a book based on the interviews of award winning director Ang Lee.
Ted Hardin
M.F.A., Ohio State University. Worked with a variety of artists at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada as director of photography, director, editor, lighting director, and assistant director. Has collaborated with the alternative media collective Paper Tiger Television in New York, and researched and shot projects for German Television on "Dark Near-Death Experiences." Heavily influenced by his studies of German Expressionism, his own work has shown at festivals and galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe. In collaboration with partner Elizabeth Coffman, Ted is currently working on a feature
documentary about Louisiana poet, Martha Serpas, and a reflective video essay about traveling through Kenya.
Paul Hettel
Paul Hettel has been making films for over thirty years. He has written and directed five feature films and over twenty-five short narrative, documentary and experimental films. Work can be screened at www.film242.com. He has filmed on location in Poland, Italy, Cyprus and the United States. His films have been screened in Europe, South America, Asia, Mexico, and the United States. Paul Hettel has been teaching at Columbia College, Chicago since 1981. His areas of specialization are: Production, Editing, Screenwriting, French and Italian Cinema.
Vaun Monroe
(Bio not available)
Russell Porter
Documentary writer, director and producer with over 100 screen credits including national and international award winners. Film teacher at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, 1994-2000; founder of the Melbourne Documentary Group and International Student Documentary Competition; extensive film teaching experience in Australia, Spain, Latin America (CCC Mexico City, EICTV Cuba, UFF and ECA-USP Brazil, FADU-UBA Argentina). Writer of “Infinity Express,” laser astronomical show at the Einstein Planetarium, National Air and Space Museum,
Washington, D.C.
Dan Rybicky
(B.A., Vassar College; M.F.A. NYU Tisch School of the Arts) recently became a tenure-track professor in the film department at Columbia College Chicago. His story “Picky” was published in Front Forty Press’s Short Stories Illustrated by Artists, which won a 2007 USA Book Award. He has written screenplays for independent producer Andrea Sperling (But I’m a Cheerleader; Pumpkin), his stage work has been produced
in different venues in NYC, including Soho Rep, and his art installation “God Bless the Me-S-A” was shown in at the Country Club gallery in Chicago in 2005. Dan has worked in different capacities for Martin Scorsese and John Sayles, and this year he received a grant to complete a documentary about his relationship to Ed Noonan, the head architect/developer of Tryon Farm, a conservation community located in
Northwest Indiana. Dan is also collaborating on a book project titled Almost There about the life and work of outsider artist Peter Anton.
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
M.F.A., University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an award winning filmmaker, screened at major international film festivals. Her films include, "Ruins Within", "The Silent Majority", "A Tajik Woman", "Saless, Far from Home". Her most recent project is "A Different Moon". She has published numerous articles on Iranian cinema and the book, "Kiarostami", co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum (2003). She has been the Artistic Consultant of the Festival of Films from Iran, at the Gene Siskel Film Center Chicago since 1989.
Bruce Sheridan
B.A. and B.A. Honors (Philosophy) with 1st Class Honors, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Chairperson of the Columbia College Chicago Film & Video Department. Over 20 years as Director, Producer and Writer of drama, documentary, music and commercial projects for cinema and television. Formerly Co-Director of the Morrison Grieve Industry Talent Development Initiative for the New Zealand Film Commission and Consultant Producer at South Pacific Pictures in Auckland, New Zealand. 1999 recipient of New Zealand’s Best Drama Award for the tele-feature Lawless. Recently completed a short film titled Kubuku Rides in partnership with Tim Evans and Terry Kinney of Steppenwolf Films which to date has been invited to the London Film Festival, the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival and the IFP New York Festival & Market. Currently directing This Song Is Old , a documentary centered on the Bn’ei Menashe people of North East India that addresses the challenges faced by small ethnic groups determined to decide their own identity and fate in the modern world.
Don Smith
M.F.A., Columbia College. Co-founder and coordinator of Semester in LA.
Independent filmmaker, producer and editor. He produced the international coproduction, feature film Threads (Khait Errouh) which was written and directed by Hakim Belabbes and was an official selection of the Venice Biennale. He also is the post production supervisor for Peter Hunt Thompson's epic documentary, El Movimiento. He was the Director of Photography for Birgit Rathsmann's documentary Grit and Polish which examines the Hong Kong film industry. His current projects include development for Finding Farris, a Palestinian-American comedy and he is in postproduction on a documentary about The Flying Wallendas directed by Paula Froehle He is the photographer for Soups of France, Chronicle Books, 2002. He is a commercial pilot and a certified flight instructor. He is the Associate Chair for The Core, Critical Studies and Documentary.
Josef (Joe) Steiff
M.F.A., Ohio University. Taught at Ohio University, Shawnee University and the University of Chicago Laboratory School as well as local international youth film programs such as Viewpoint and MediaBridge. As a former licensed social worker who has presented regionally and nationally on psychological issues such as adolescent depression and suicide, sexual orientation and HIV/AIDS, he creates work reflecting the ways in which people struggle to make sense out of random, impersonal events. His solo performance work includes the critically acclaimed theatrical show Golden Corral, and he is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Independent Filmmaking as well as the co-editor of a forthcoming book analyzing Battlestar Galactica. Steiff’s work in film and video production includes line-producing for Korean television and crewing on several short and feature-length documentaries, including an Academy Award nominee, as well as writing and directing his own award-winning narrative, documentary and experimental films. The feature film he co-wrote and codirected, soulMaid, is now showing in festivals and will be released on DVD next year. He is currently the department’s Associate Chair over Producing, Screenwriting and Directing.