Staff Bio and Pic

Welcome to the Visions6 class.  As you've figured out already, I'm the professor for this course.  My BFA is in Art - Photography, but sine the late 90s my work has focused on festival management and documentary/experimental filmmaking.  I received my MFA in Film Production from the University of Iowa, but my hometown is Austin, TX.  "Keep Austin Weird" is the actual city motto and I embrace it fully.

To give you a bit more about me as a person, not just your teacher, here are few things about me:

1) I LOVE FILM...like real FILM...like Super 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm.  Shooting it, editing it, watching it.  Love, Love, Love.

2) I have the super coolest kid in the world...Kai.  You'll hear about him sometimes.  Learn to humor me with smiles and nods about his greatness.

3) I love living near the beach.  How I managed to live landlocked for 20 years I do not know.  :)

4) I'm a non-zealous Whedonite...though I could really have done without Angel.

5) My humor is dark and dry...deal with it.

To give you a bit more information about my professional work, I've included my official bio below.

~Shannon

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Shannon Silva is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. An experimental and documentary filmmaker, her principal areas of interest include issues of gender, celebrity culture, fandom, and community building creative initiatives.

In addition to directing/producing over 30 short films and videos, she has worked as Screenplay Competition Director for the Austin Film Festival, Marketing Director for Austin Cinemaker Coop, and was a founding member of the Iowa City Microcinema. Her films have screened at the Dallas Video Festival, Atlanta Underground, Athens International, Humboldt Film Festival, FLEX, Docutah, LA Femme, Central Florida Film Festival, St. John's International Women's Film Festival and more.

She is the Faculty Supervisor for the Visions Film Festival and Conference (hosted on the UNCW campus by the Film Studies Department each spring), and, as a lover of all things related to film festivals, she has participated in screening committees for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, SXSW, Iowa City Documentary Festival, Cinematexas, and the Cucalorus Film Festival.

In 2013, her feature length documentary, It’s A Girl Thing: Tween Queens and The Commodification of Girlhood, completed its festival run and was awarded Best Social Documentary at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival. Freestyle, a short narrative film that she produced in Fall 2013, just finished up its festival run at Mill Valley International.

Her next film, Red, is in pre-production and was recently awarded a $3000 Summer Research Grant. The experimental, narrative is set in late 1930's, Lumberton, NC and focuses on two sisters growing up in a share-cropping family.

Welcome to Visions 6!!!!

Festival Research Assignment Cometh

So for most of the week I have spent my free time getting as many festival directors as I could to agree to let our lovely class members interview them on their management and jurying practices.  Not only will this be a great way to figure out who we want to be (and what we ought to be) as Visions6, but it's also going to provide us with an amazing amount of data that might later be useful in writing up an article about festival and conference practices.

To make it even more fantabulous, the assignment allows everyone in the class to reach out as 1) an advocate from UNCW/FST/Visions, 2) young, up-and-coming filmmakers/scholars who may present at their fests/conf someday and 3) individuals who might someday work at one of these events.

These foundational elements always make us just that much better each year...so do your research and seize this opportunity.

I realize this post is a little on the peppy side...but whatever...Go team!