Cheryl Dunye, Guinever Turner, Alex Juhasz (The Watermelon Woman) along with Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar (Margarita With A Straw) will discuss independent filmmaking and the value of queer of color cinema in this lively filmmaking panel. Moderated by Prof. Jennifer DeClue (Smith College), this panel brings together the creative minds that produced these two provocative and groundbreaking films.
Date & Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Location: Smith College, Wright Hall Weinstein Auditorium
Panelists
Cheryl Dunye is a native of Liberia, received her BA from Temple University and her MFA from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 1996, Dunye wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, The Watermelon Woman. It was awarded the Teddy Bear at the Berlin Internaitonal Film Festival, and won Best Feature at OutFest LA, Italy’s Torino, and France’s Creteil Film Festival. The Watermelon Woman was recently honored as one of the OutFest UCLA Legacy Project films, and granted a pristine 2K remastering for re-release.
Dunye’s most recent film, BLACK IS BLUE, won awards at five major festivals, and has struck a powerful nerve with its exploration of everyday racism and transphobic experiences in the lives of trans black men. Her fifth feature film, MOMMY IS COMING, continues to win international awards as the first queer adult romantic comedy. Dunye’s fourth feature film THE OWLS, was celebrated at national and international film festivals in 2010.
Based in Oakland, Dunye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University.
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is the producer of the feature films The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including You Tube (Learning from YouTube, MIT Press, 2011: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-youtube-0) and feminist pedgogy and community (she is the co-founder of Fem TechNet, an international feminist collective that runs the world’s most successful “anti-MOOC”:http://femtechnet.org/). Dr. Juhasz makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She has produced educational videotapes on feminist issue from AIDS to teen pregnancy, and directed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), Dear Gabe (2003) and Women of Vision:18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998), as well as the shorts RELEASED: 5 Short Videos and Women and Prison (2000) and Naming Prairies (2001), an official selection of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Currently, she is currently the Chair of the Film Department at Brooklyn College.
Guinevere Turner is a writer, director and actor who has been working in film and TV since her 1994 debut film Go Fish. Her acting roles include parts in The Watermelon Woman, Chasing Amy, American Psycho and Treasure Island. She teamed up with director Mary Harron to write the films American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page. She was a writer and story editor on Showtime’s The L Word, and she played a recurring character on that show. She has written and directed five short films, two of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her latest film, called Kill Your Ego, follows the women who killed for Charles Manson in the beginning of their long prison term, and will also be directed by Mary Harron in 2017.
Shonali Bose earned an MA in Political Science at Columbia University followed by an MFA in Directing from the UCLA Film School. As a student at UCLA she received a number of top awards. After graduating she taught at NYFA, Universal Studios for a year. Then she was accepted in Film Independent’s Project Involve as she started raising funds for her debut feature – Amu.
Nilesh Maniyar was in his final year studying engineering in Pune University when he saw the film Amu by Shonali Bose. He was already a film buff and was at the festival soaking in as many films as possible. Amu shook him to the core and inspired him to become a filmmaker himself. He quit his engineering career and set out for Mumbai – to make his dream come true. He worked as a Casting Director and Assistant Director on films of leading directors such as Vishal Bhardwaj (Kaminey) and Anurag Kashyap Productions (Aiyya). Finally he got to work on the casting of Chittagong written and produced by Shonali. This started a creative partnership that ended in Nilesh being the Co-Creator of Margarita With a Straw. He has passionately birthed this film every step of the way alongside Shonali. He is the Casting Director, Producer, Writer and Co-Director of the film.
Jennifer DeClue earned her Ph.D. in American studies and ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She teaches queer studies courses that focus on ways that gender, sexuality, race, class and ability produce marginalization and belonging, while paying close attention to the manner in which queer bodies are represented in culture. Through a cultural studies approach to the study of women and gender, DeClue brings her experience as a filmmaker to discussions of visual representation, the production of knowledge and power, and the multiplicity of racialized gendered embodiments. By engaging with queer theoretical texts and critical concepts of race and class alongside visual and literary cultural production, her courses explore how representation and theoretical analysis can create systems of knowing that help us make sense of hierarchies of race, gender, class, ability and sexuality. Her research has been published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and the cinema journal Spectator. Her analysis of cinematic representations of black lesbian and queer sexuality will be published in the forthcoming black queer studies anthology No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies and the cinema studies anthology Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making. Before beginning her career in academia, DeClue worked in film production in Los Angeles, screened films for the Sundance film festival, programmed films for the Outfest film festival and served as the film programmer for Outfest Fusion from 2011 through 2013.