Kyle Bostian - Assistant Professor
Kyle Bostian holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in theatre and dramaturgy from Florida State University. He teaches theatre history and modern drama to undergraduates and various seminars in the M.F.A. acting program. In addition to his classroom duties, he's head of the history/literature unit and dramaturg for the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Bostian is active outside Point Park as a playwright, director, dramaturg and, occasionally, performer. His scripts have been finalists and semifinalists in national competitions and have had readings and productions at university and professional theatres. Directing credits include a fully staged developmental workshop of Arthur Kopit's Discovery of America with the playwright in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point while Bostian was on the faculty there. He's also the founder of NEW stAGE (www.new-stage.org) and Pittsburgh PACT (pghpact.blogspot.com) and is a member of Dramatists Guild, The Playwrights' Center, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, and Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Jeremy Braverman - Associate Professor
Jeremy Braverman is an independent filmmaker and faculty member in the Department of Cinema & Digital Arts at Point Park University, where he serves as the directing concentration coordinator. He received his M.F.A. in film & video from Columbia College Chicago. His short films have played in festivals around the country, including the New Orleans International Film Festival, Columbus International Film Festival (Bronze Plaque winner), The Chicago Collegiate Film Festival (Future of Chicago Award) and on "video i" (KTEH television, San Jose, Calif.). His industry experience includes freelance production work in the Chicago independent film industry and work as an editor and videographer on promotional and industrial videos. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a television personality, freelance translator and altogether rootless vagabond in Budapest, Hungary. He is originally from Chesterfield, Mo.
Nelson Chipman - Assistant Professor & Cinema Chair
Nelson Chipman is a screenwriter, filmmaker and playwright. He holds a B.S. in commerce from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University. He began his career writing and producing television commercials and writing advertising copy. From there, he began writing feature scripts and has developed work for and optioned work to directors and production companies in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. He has won numerous writing awards and has been a finalist twice for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. His most recent short film, Squared, has screened at festivals across the country, and he is currently putting the finishing touches on a new short film and feature script. He has previously taught at schools throughout the New York City metropolitan area.
Steve Cuden - Assistant Professor
Steve Cuden, a proud native of Pittsburgh, is a writer-director-producer who holds a B.A. in theater from the University of Southern California and an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the University of California Los Angeles. During more than 30 years in Hollywood, he wrote dozens of teleplays for TV series such as: X-Men, The Batman, Iron Man, Xiaolin Showdown, Loonatics Unleashed, The Mask, Goof Troop, Bonkers, Quack Pack, Gargoyles, Beetlejuice, Savage Dragon, Pink Panther, RoboCop, Extreme Ghostbusters, Stargate Infinity, Skeleton Warriors, ExoSquad and many others. He directed and co-produced the cult-favorite horror-comedy feature Lucky, for which he won Best Director at the Nodance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Lucky also won awards for Best Feature at The New York City Horror Film Festival, Shriekfest in Los Angeles and MicroCineFest in Baltimore. Cuden co-created the Broadway and international stage hit, Jekyll & Hyde The Musical, writing the show’s original book and lyrics with composer Frank Wildhorn. Jekyll & Hyde ran for four years on Broadway, enjoyed three U.S. national tours and has been produced throughout the U.S. by hundreds of theater companies, large and small. After being translated into more than 20 languages, the show has also been staged in numerous venues the world over.
Andrew Halasz - Assistant Professor
Andrew Halasz is a filmmaker and media artist originally from New Jersey. His works include films, web art and mixed-media installations. Halasz worked as a sound designer/editor for motion pictures and television in NYC before moving to Pittsburgh to teach at Point Park University. His work has exhibited theatrically and on television, both nationally and internationally. Some of his post-production sound credits include the Sundance Film Festival award-winner Family Portrait and the Berlin Film Festival award-winner Vanaja, which was named by Roger Ebert as one of the top foreign films of 2007. Halasz is the co-creator and coordinator of Greetings from Pittsburgh: Neighborhood Narratives, a film in which nine local filmmakers tell stories of nine Pittsburgh neighborhoods. This project received a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Grant, a Heinz Endowment Small Arts Initiative Grant and a Pittsburgh Foundation A.W. Mellon Special Projects Grant.
Rick Hawkins - Artist in Residence
Rick Hawkins is an Emmy-winning screenwriter whose career in Hollywood includes successes as a producer, studio executive and international media consultant. Beginning with The Carol Burnett Show —where his now iconic “Went With the Wind” sketch contains the longest-sustained laugh in television history — Hawkins went on to pen the ABC telefilm, The Love Boat, which piloted the long-running series. Hawkins’ writing credits include landmark variety series and top-rated sitcoms and dramas, for which he has earned seven Emmy Award nominations and five WGA Award nominations. Hawkins has served as lecturer and teacher at the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Moscow, as well as the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Warner Brothers Comedy Writing workshops.
Ben Hernstrom - Adjunct Faculty
Ben Hernstrom attended the University of Pittsburgh from 2001 to 2005, graduating summa cum laude with a dual B.A. degree in film studies and German language and literature. Soon after, he formed Ambulantic, a video production company. With Ambulantic, he has produced documentaries, music videos, experimental works, video installations and short narratives, including segments for the cable channel Current TV. In 2007, he began producing a video series for PopCityMedia.com and KeystoneEdge.com about young artists, writers, performers and entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh titled Young Creatives, which continues to run with new episodes nearly every month. In 2008, Hernstrom received an individual artist fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for Media Arts: Narrative, and that summer, he traveled to Madagascar to shoot VazahaVazaha screened in the 2009 Three Rivers Film Festival and the Three Rivers Arts Festival and was featured on WQED’s television program Filmmakers Corner in 2010. In early 2010, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts awarded Hernstrom with a solo exhibition. Titled RECALL, it was a collaboration with artist Frank Ferraro examining the relationship between memory and digital experience. Hernstrom was named the 2010 Video Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Technology Council at its annual Design, Art and Technology Awards (DATA). His newest works are a digital photo series examining urban space in Reykjavík, Iceland and a video that looks at the role of language in intimacy. Both were created as part of artist residencies at SÍM and Nes in Iceland throughout the summer of 2010. (Foreigner), an experimental documentary exploring themes of race, class, place, poverty and representation.
Mitchell Kaplan - Adjunct Professor
Mitchell James Kaplan majored in English literature at Yale. His film industry career began in 1986 when he was hired as a production associate on The Couch Trip, promoted to product placement coordinator, and then to assistant to the director. With director Michael Ritchie, he developed the screenplay for Cool Runnings and then worked in the crucial but uncredited role of script liaison between big-name writers (who were scabbing during the Writer's Guild strike of 1988) and the above-the-line team on Fletch Lives. Kirk Douglas hired him to run the creative side of his company, Bryna Productions, and to help him write his first novel, which was sold in a $1 million deal to Random House. Working as a writing team with his wife Annie, Kaplan was hired by a number of offshore and non-Writer's Guild Signatory production companies to write and rewrite dozens of screenplays before finally selling his first “studio picture” to Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters). Disney hired Kaplan and his wife to write an animated feature, and he continued writing and consulting as a script doctor for major screenwriters and producers until 2006, when he decided to pen a novel. Critical acclaim for By Fire, By Water (Other Press / Random House) has been overwhelmingly favorable.
Randy Kovitz - Adjunct Professor
Randy Kovitz has worked in the entertainment industry for most of his life. After graduating from the acting program at Carnegie Mellon University, he worked in Pittsburgh for a time, acting in theater and doing his first film and television work at WQED and in Dawn of the Dead and Knightriders for George Romero. In 2005, after 10 years in New York and nearly 20 in Los Angeles, he came back to Pittsburgh. Along the way, Kovitz has worked as an actor, director, musician, fight director, writer, stunt coordinator, teacher and sound designer. He led the award-winning L.A. spoken word band Lies Like Truth for more than a decade, garnering Drama-Logue and LA Weekly awards. His short film The Specials, which he wrote, produced, co-directed and acted in, has played at film festivals across the country. Lightweight, a script he co-wrote, was a finalist in the Steeltown Film Factory competition in 2009 and was subsequently produced with Kovitz directing and is currently on the film festival track. Kovtiz received an M.F.A. from Point Park in 2008. Along with co-director and Point Park colleague Jeremy Braverman, Kovitz recently completed shooting the Internet-based project 17 Days.
Deirdre Maitre - Assistant Professor
Deirdre Maitre received her M.F.A. in film & media arts from Temple University in 2005. She began her career in post-production as an assistant Avid editor at Philo Television in San Francisco. Since then, she has worked on many documentary and narrative projects throughout North America. In addition to teaching, Maitre also freelances on commercial and non-profit videos. Currently, she is the post-production supervisor on Deron Albright’s feature film, The Destiny of Lesser Animals.
Drew Moniot - Adjunct Professor
Drew Moniot, Ph.D., is the creative development manager at KDKA-TV, where he writes, produces and directs award-winning television commercials. He won a regional Emmy for the documentary Thistledown: A Day at the Races. His commercials have won numerous local, regional, national and international awards. Moniot earned a B.S. from Slippery Rock University with a double major in psychology and art. He earned an M.S. in radio-TV-film from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from Temple University. His paper James Bond and America: An Investigation of the Formula Film in Popular Culture was published in the Journal of the University Film Association and has been quoted in articles and books about the 007 movie franchise and its social and cultural impact. As a graduate assistant at Temple University, Moniot taught courses in the history of feature film, as well as the history of documentary film. He also wrote, directed, shot and edited a short 16mm documentary film. He has studied with directors Robert Wise and Michael Pressman. He is currently a regular guest movie reviewer on “Pittsburgh Today Live” on KDKA-TV, as well as a freelance photographer, director and producer.
John Rice - Senior Teaching Artist
John Rice began his career in feature films working on George Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. As director and director of photography, Rice’s commercial work has garnered Clio, Addy, Mobius, and Art Director's Club awards. His work as director of photography for features and documentaries has been broadcast nationally on PBS and screened at the Sundance Film Festival and numerous other film festivals around the world. Recent work directed by Rice includes: Dumpster (winner of Best Drama/Comedy at The Indie Gathering Festival; winner of Best International Comedy–Mid Length Film at the Calgary Fringe Festival), and Milk Crate (Greetings from Pittsburgh: Neighborhood Narratives, Beverly Hills Hi-Def Film Festival). Rice is a founding member and has programmed Silk Screen, an Asian-American Film Festival, for five years. He is in post-production on Thunder Over Braddock and recently completed the film Mr. Pleasant, which premiered at the 2010 Three Rivers Film Festival.
Chris Sepesy - Adjunct Professor
Christopher Sepesy brings an entire career in government and a base of the political, financial and legal side of filmmaking to Point Park. A Pittsburgh native, he intended to head for Hollywood after obtaining training in writing and economics from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and The London School of Economics, but took an unorthodox side route through Washington, D.C., when he was hired to be an aide for United States Senator H. John Heinz IV. From there, an apprenticeship in policy development and lobbying led to an extended stint under Jack Valenti at the Motion Picture Association of America. During his time with Valenti, he was able not only to observe and sometimes assist feature films in production, but he was also able to construct and help to implement many of the policies governing all of the production, sales and distribution of American motion pictures, specifically in international markets. He has overseen the incubation of no less than three production company start-up ventures, and is currently involved with a joint Franco-Italian production venture. He teaches many of the cinema history and analysis courses at Point Park.
Lisa Smith-Reed - Adjunct Professor
Lisa Smith-Reed is a native of Dormont and received her B.A. in theater from Gannon University in Erie. Smith-Reed spent more than 10 years working in film and documentary television, including the Emmy-nominated Project Greenlight for HBO; the feature film Abduction, directed by John Singleton; and The People Speak, directed by Chris Moore and featuring Howard Zinn, Josh Brolin, Matt Damon, Bob Dylan, Marisa Tomei, among many others. Smith-Reed was also a line producer for the Pollie Award-winning First Tuesday Media and worked on political ads with diverse talents like Christopher Keyser, Jenno Topping, Bruce Cohen, J.J. Abrams, Cameron Crowe, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Larry Fong. Smith-Reed also produced several Discovery Channel series, including Fit Nation and SOS: Coast Guard, as well as numerous MTV and VH1 series. Prior to that, she was on staff at both Pittsburgh Public Theater and City Theatre where she worked with noted artists such as August Wilson, Marsha Mason, Keith Reddin and Spalding Gray. Smith-Reed also sits on the planning committee for the Building Change Film Festival and is the producer of the Steeltown Film Factory, a filmmaking competition based in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Tanya Stadelmann - Adjunct Professor
Tanya Stadelmann is a Swiss-Australian filmmaker and media artist who has been working in Australia and the United States for the last 15 years. Stadelmann began studying photography and film in San Francisco and then completed her Bachelor of Arts in film & TV at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School in Sydney. She has worked internationally as a cinematographer, director and editor on dramas, documentaries and music videos, and also as a publicity photographer for television and theater. Her work as a cinematographer has been broadcast nationally on Australian television and has screened at Cannes Film Festival and numerous film festivals around the world. She has created multi-media projections for Sydney Arts Festival, Sydney Opera House, The Art Institute in San Francisco and Det Apne Theater in Oslo, Norway. Her publicity photography has been published in the U.S., Australia, Switzerland and Norway. Since moving to Pittsburgh in October 2008, Stadelmann has performed at the Andy Warhol Museum with The Jilted Brides, made video projections for local theater troupe Squonk Opera and has worked on commissioned short documentaries for Citiparks Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Glass Center, as well as various personal video and photography projects. She began teaching film production as an adjunct faculty member at Point Park University in January 2009.
Kristine Trever - Adjunct Professor
Kristine Trever is a filmmaker, writer and video artist originally from Detroit, Mich. She earned a B.A. in film studies and an M.A. in media arts, both from Wayne State University. Her short films, videos and photography have shown both nationally and internationally at festivals, galleries and competitions, including the San Francisco Short Film Festival, University of Windsor Film Festival (winner, Best Short Drama), Digital Shorts Film + Video Festival, Arlene’s Grocery Picture Show, the Mitten Movie Project, Digital Fringe/Melbourne Film Festival and Ferencvarosi Pince Gallery in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived in 2008 as an artist-in-residency. She has worked as a commercial producer and director for the NBC affiliate WDIV-TV4 in Detroit and as senior video editor of VCU InSight, a 30-minute news magazine program airing on PBS in Richmond, Va. Trever is currently completing her Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary media, art and text program from Virginia Commonwealth University.