MEDIA ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE AND GUEST LIST
MEDIA MAIN CURRICULUM PEOPLE HIGHLIGHTS AUDITIONS UPCOMING EVENTS
Meet the Artists-in-Residence and guests of Asawa SOTA Media. Scroll down for details.
A French-American documentary filmmaker, Anne is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Mac Dowell Colony Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow.
In 2005, she won an Emmy Award for her documentary In Rwanda We Say…The Family That Does Not Speak Dies. In 2009, her film "My Neighbor My Killer" was Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival and a nominee for Best Documentary at the Gotham Awards.
Suha is often found overhearing, watching, or telling a story. As an artist and filmmaker she has focused on the displacement of immigrant communities.
An American film director, cinematographer, editor, and screenwriter best known as the co-writer of the 2006 film Half Nelson. She is known for her collaborations with fellow filmmaker Ryan Fleck.
Have You Seen This Man?, Gowanus, Brooklyn, Young Rebels, Half Nelson, Sugar, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Mississippi Grind,
Spark: A Burning Man Story, Inequality for All, The Dust Bowl, Independent Lens, First Cousin Once Removed, Symphony of the Soil,
Check here for full list of credits.
An American writer, best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). In 2009, he published a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals. While Foer's works have been released to widespread critical acclaim, he remains a somewhat polarizing figure among contemporary critics and academics, attracting in equal measure both passionate praise and criticism. Foer currently teaches creative writing at New York University.
The creator and lead vocalist of Michael Franti & Spearhead, a band that blends hip hop with a variety of other styles including funk, reggae, jazz, folk, and rock. He is also an outspoken supporter for a wide spectrum of peace and social justice issues.
A Bay Area native working in a variety of cinematic disciplines. Joey's work has ventured into the depths of experimental cinema, culminating in an ambitious film collaboration with esteemed avant-garde composer John Zorn.
Stepsister premiered at The New York Film Festival in 2011 and was commercially released by Tzadik Recordings in 2012.
Since then, Joey has widened his scope to include an eclectic mix of narratives ranging from morbid occult melodrama to wry-humored naturalism. Joey Izzo earned his MFA in film production from San Francisco State University in 2012. He was awarded a Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship Tuition Grant from the SF Foundation for his first year film, Chuck's Chicken.
An award-winning independent American filmmaker from Portland, Oregon, Katz's breakthrough came in 2006 when his first feature Dance Party USA, premiered at the 2006 South by Southwest Film Festival. Katz wrote and directed the film for around $2,000 and shot for two weeks in his hometown of Portland with a small crew of friends. The film went on to play at numerous festivals all over the world and was listed as a top ten film by the New York Sun.
Katz quickly followed it in 2007 with Quiet City. Using some of the same crew and a similar budget, he shot the film in eight days in Brooklyn and again premiered the film at South by Southwest. Quiet City features fellow filmmaker Joe Swanberg in a supporting role and the two were subsequently cited as two of the founders of a new independent film movement called "mumblecore". The film was released in theaters on August 31, 2007 and grossed $15,610 over its modest run.
Katz, as well as Erin Fisher, Cris Lankenau, Brendan McFadden and Ben Stambler were nominated for the John Cassevetes Award at the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards, given to the best film produced for under $500,000, for Quiet City.
Born in Washington, D.C., raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Armistead is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, and served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam.
Maupin worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. In 1976 he launched his groundbreaking Tales of the City serial in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Maupin is the author of nine novels, including the six-volume Tales of the City series, Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener and, most recently, Michael Tolliver Lives. Three miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney were made from the first three Tales novels. The Night Listener became a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette.
Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner.
An American movie and documentary film director, Meltzer teaches documentary film and video production in the Art Department of Stanford University, as part of the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video.
Pegasus (1998), a short film made as a graduate student at San Francisco State University, chronicles the adventures of a gay motorcycle club on a joy ride in Marin County, was screened at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
His feature film debut, Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (2003), an hour-long documentary, played at festivals worldwide, and was screened on PBS' Independent Lens series in 2003.
Welcome to Nollywood (2007), a documentary about the explosive phenomenon of Nigerian movies, aired on PBS as part of the AfroPop Series in 2008.
La Caminata (2009), a short film that explores the efforts of a small Mexican town to combat the migration of their community to the U.S., played at film festivals in 2009, including the AFI Silverdocs Festival and the True/False Film Festival.
"Informant" (2012), a feature-length documentary film about the turbulent journey of Brandon Darby, a radical leftist activist turned FBI informant turned right-wing Tea Party activist, premiered at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, "With uncommon restraint, Meltzer delivers a fascinating study that transcends political chest beating. Informant raises the possibility of fluid truth in a system addicted to false binaries." The film won the Best Documentary Jury Award at the Austin Film Festival in October 2012.
Omori began her career as a cinematographer in 1968. She has freelanced as a cinematographer on many award-winning documentaries. In 1991, she wrote and directed the highly acclaimed drama, Hot Summer Winds, a co-production of American Playhouse and KCET. In 1999, her documentary/memoir, Rabbit in the Moon, about her family’s confinement in a World War II American concentration camp, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on POV, and won a National Emmy and numerous other awards. With Wendy Slick, she co-produced and directed Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm which premiered at Lincoln Center in New York.
An Iraqi film director and writer, Oday studied at the Institute for Electrical Science as well as the Faculty of Applicable Arts in Baghdad, both of which he quit early to dedicate himself to cinema.
He initially worked as freelance writer, writing essays and film reviews in Baghdad. In 1998, he enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts but soon quit his film studies due to the propagandistic nature of the school and questionable standards concerning the definition of "quality".
He wrote and directed numerous short films and was part of the artistic collective known as Najeen (the survivors). After the American invasion of Iraq, he began making feature films.
He is a principal with The Iraqi Independent Film Production Center, committed to the future of Iraqi Films,
American film director, screenwriter, producer and military veteran. Stone came to public prominence between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s for writing and directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had participated as an infantry soldier. Many of Stone's films focus on contemporary and controversial American political and cultural issues, such as JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon.
Stone's films often combine different camera and film formats within a single scene as evidenced in JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. British newspaper The Guardian has described Stone as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema." Stone has received three Academy Awards for his work on the films Midnight Express, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July. He was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2007 Austin Film Festival.
An American progressive journalist, author and media entrepreneur. Talbot is the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of one of the first web magazines, Salon.com.
Talbot founded Salon in 1995, when the web was still in its infancy, and is considered one of the pioneers of online journalism. Under Talbot's leadership, the magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net's "few genuine must-reads".
Since leaving Salon, Talbot has established a reputation as a revisionist historian, working on the Kennedy assasination and other areas of "hidden history."
Talbot has worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine, a features editor for The San Francisco Examiner, and has written for Time magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other publications.
Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, Williams went on to establish a successful career in both stand-up comedy and feature film acting. His film career includes such acclaimed films as Good Morning,Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, The Fisher King, and Good Will Hunting, Popeye, Hook, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, The Birdcage, Night at the Museum, and Happy Feet.
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times, Williams went on to receive theAcademy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Good Will Hunting. He has also received two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.