Category: Autumn 2020

  • Marc Downie on Digital Theater and Alternate Reality Games

    Marc Downie on Digital Theater and Alternate Reality Games

    By Amy Skjerseth Marc Downie wears a number of hats. He’s a lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies and in Media Arts and Design. He’s a world-renowned artist—part of OpenEndedGroup, along with collaborator Paul Kaiser—who has had commissions from the Centre Pompidou, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and other institutions, and has worked with such…

  • Telling South Side Stories: Elizabeth Myles on Her Work at Film Festivals and the Logan Center Production Institute

    Telling South Side Stories: Elizabeth Myles on Her Work at Film Festivals and the Logan Center Production Institute

    By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate If you attended Film Studies Center events over the past four years, you likely saw Elizabeth Myles (BA, ’20) filming artist talks and running screenings. “When projecting for CMS courses, I loved to see what they screened,” Myles reflects, “like James Rosenow’s pairing of Daisies and Clueless for Intro to Film.” But…

  • A Tribute to Professor Robert Bird

    A Tribute to Professor Robert Bird

    By Jennifer Wild It is with profound sorrow that the Department of Cinema and Media Studies mourns the passing of Robert Bird on September 7, 2020 after a nine-month battle with colon cancer. Even before joining the department as a full faculty member in 2012, Robert would regularly cross-list his classes with CMS, including “Narratives…

  • Allison Whitney on Student and Community Engagement at Texas Tech

    Allison Whitney on Student and Community Engagement at Texas Tech

    By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate As the first official Ph.D. graduate of CMS, Allison Whitney recalls the excitement of a university film culture that involved the broader Chicago community. “One of the things that was so crucial to my education,” Whitney remembers, “was the presence of the Film Studies Center and Doc Films.…

  • K. L. Sanders on Digital Culture, Research in France, and the Quantified Cow

    K. L. Sanders on Digital Culture, Research in France, and the Quantified Cow

    By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate For K.L. Sanders, Summer 2020 has yielded many potential case studies for her work on digital culture. In July, she attended Northwestern University’s Summer Institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture: Media Aesthetics II, an intensive, five-day event held entirely online. The theme was “Scenes of the Screen,” apt…