Diversity statement

I believe in the impor­tance of art as a social good, and in the val­ue of its acces­si­bil­i­ty to all people.

Like most of our world, the film indus­try was built on a foun­da­tion of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and that sys­temic bias con­tin­ues today. Film sets and pro­duc­tion offices can be par­tic­u­lar­ly unfriend­ly places for women, peo­ple of col­or, and mem­bers of the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty; I’ve lost count, for instance, of my female friends who have aban­doned careers in tech­ni­cal film pro­duc­tion because they felt so exclud­ed on set. Their departure—and the depar­tures of those who have had sim­i­lar experiences—is a dev­as­tat­ing loss to an indus­try that is infu­ri­at­ing­ly slow to change. Fem­i­nism is not only for women; race jus­tice is not only for peo­ple of col­or; equal­i­ty is not only for the oppressed. Mak­ing art and build­ing class­rooms that embrace and cel­e­brate diver­si­ty ben­e­fits us all by invit­ing us to par­tic­i­pate in a world that is larg­er and more com­plex than our­selves and our own experiences.

This isn’t just a ques­tion of encour­ag­ing diver­si­ty in the pro­duc­tion process, either: issues of rep­re­sen­ta­tion spill over into course design. Although I do my best to screen work by artists out­side of the insti­tu­tion­al­ly select­ed cin­e­mat­ic canon, the fact remains that most film­mak­ers who have seen sig­nif­i­cant mate­r­i­al suc­cess (in Hol­ly­wood, but also in inde­pen­dent and avant-garde film) are a dis­tinct­ly homoge­nous bunch. This is some­thing stu­dents can and should be dis­cussing with their peers in class, and those dis­cus­sions intro­duce a host of questions:

• How should we appre­ci­ate the gen­uine­ly valu­able works of these film­mak­ers, know­ing that their suc­cess came at the expense of oth­er artists who were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly silenced by insti­tu­tion­al discrimination?
• What do our aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences tell us about our­selves? Are the aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences of the con­tem­po­rary film indus­try and audi­ence inher­ent­ly prej­u­diced against cer­tain identities?
• How do these con­cerns illu­mi­nate greater issues in our soci­ety at large?
• What is our respon­si­bil­i­ty as artists mak­ing work today?

I don’t often explic­it­ly intro­duce such dis­cus­sion top­ics because I find my stu­dents are more will­ing to engage with them if they arise organ­i­cal­ly, from oth­er conversations—which they fre­quent­ly do. In those sit­u­a­tions, my respon­si­bil­i­ty is to step back, make some room in the sched­ule to accom­mo­date what usu­al­ly becomes a much longer dis­cus­sion, and occa­sion­al­ly ask a guid­ing or clar­i­fy­ing ques­tion. This con­tent can be dif­fi­cult to cov­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents of priv­i­lege who haven’t yet had to con­front the ways in which their advan­tages might come at a cost to oth­ers, but engag­ing with these prob­lems as ear­ly as pos­si­ble in their aca­d­e­m­ic careers has the poten­tial to make them more mind­ful citizens—not only in the con­text of their art prac­tice and edu­ca­tion, but also in their lives more broadly.

Of course, there are more direct ways I try to make my class­es more wel­com­ing to stu­dents who may have felt exclud­ed in the past. My expe­ri­ences teach­ing at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege and an access uni­ver­si­ty have giv­en me ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to work with a diverse pop­u­la­tion of stu­dents who often need addi­tion­al sup­port to suc­ceed in class: some­thing as sim­ple as allow­ing some flex­i­bil­i­ty in assign­ment due dates and build­ing in-process cri­tiques and con­fer­ences into long-term assign­ment sched­ules can make a world of dif­fer­ence in the aca­d­e­m­ic tra­jec­to­ries of non­tra­di­tion­al stu­dents who work or have fam­i­lies to care for, and for incom­ing first-gen­er­a­tion stu­dents who don’t have a frame of ref­er­ence for exact­ly what is expect­ed of them in college.

As should be the case, this work is nev­er done. In addi­tion to mak­ing my cours­es more acces­si­ble to non­tra­di­tion­al and first-gen­er­a­tion stu­dents, I hope to find ways to fur­ther decol­o­nize my approach to teach­ing, rely less on lec­ture, and encour­age adven­tur­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion between students.