View Film Studies' Faculty & Staff below!
Department Chair & Professor | CV
Tim Palmer (he/him/lui) is a revisionist historian whose research in French and world cinema engages film style, archival practice, subtitling, stardom, gender and performance. His books are Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), Irreversible (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and, as co-editor, Directory of World Cinema: France (Intellect/University of Chicago, 2013). He is also co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Film Matters journal. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. His latest book project is Cinema Marianne: A New History of Women and Marginality in the French Film Ecosystem.
R23 2306 | 910.962.7475 | palmert@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor | CV
Lani Akande teaches courses in Introduction to Film Studies, Nollywood, African Cinema, and Postcolonial Cinema. His interests include the formal and aesthetic characteristics of African cinemas as a site for formulating newer and more indigenously sensitive theories. Informed by African histories and cultures, epistemologies, philosophies, artforms and practices, he seeks a decolonial re-imagination of African cinemas and how they are taught. His articles have appeared in Film Education, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
R23 2340 | 910.962.3504 | akandel@uncw.edu
Part-Time Faculty
R23 2308 | 910.962.7502 | barrowj@uncw.edu
Professor | CV
Todd Berliner teaches film aesthetics, narration, and style and American film history. He is the author of Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2010). He was the founding chair of UNCW’s Film Studies Department and the recipient of two Fulbright Scholar awards, including the Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Chair in American Studies.
R23 2316 | 910.962.3336 | berlinert@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor
R23 2336 | 910.962.3065 | bettsm@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor
R23 2304
Associate Chair & Assistant Professor | CV
Stefani Byrd’s (she/they) research focuses on digital feminism, imbalanced power structures, and barriers to empathy in a digitally networked society. Her work has been exhibited at places such as the CICA Museum (South Korea), SONIC MATTER Festival (Zurich), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante (Spain). She is the Founding Director of the Intersectional Feminist Media Lab (IFML) and teaches courses in video installation, projection mapping, 360 virtual reality filmmaking, and interactive media spaces. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from UC San Diego.
R23 2314 | 910.962.3910 | byrds@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor | website
Laura Dunn’s documentary work has screened at festivals, cinemas, and museums worldwide including Sundance, Berlinale, and the Modern Museum of Art. Awards include a Rockefeller Media Fellowship, International Documentary Association Pare Lorentz Grant, Student Academy Award, SXSW Film Festival Jury Prize for Visual Design, Yale University Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, DC Environmental Film Festival “Beautiful Swimmer’s” Award and the Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Prize.
R23 2330 | 910.962.2609 | sewelll@uncw.edu
Associate Professor | CV
Chip Hackler teaches screenwriting, directing, and narrative filmmaking. Working in the film industry for more than thirty years, Hackler has worked on camera crews for movies including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Interview with the Vampire, and Iron Man III.
The short films Hackler has written and directed have screened at numerous international and juried film festivals. Awards include the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the Charleston International Film Festival, Best of Festival at the Route 66 International Film Festival, Best California Short at the California Film Awards, and the Sunshine Award (for “making the audience the happiest”) at the Real to Reel International Film Festival.
R23 2318 | 910.962.7389 | hacklerc@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor | CV
As an experimental filmmaker, cinematographer. and artist, Kate Hinshaw draws upon memory and mythology, and utilizes tactile filmmaking techniques in order to abstract experience.
She is particularly interested in using handcrafted methods to make known the hand of the filmmaker, which simultaneously defies perfectionism and gestures to the vulnerability beneath. More specifically, her films frequently use 35mm, 16mm, and super 8mm film that have been altered and animated through bleaching, scratching, painting, and burning the emulsion. As a cinematographer, she collaborates with documentarians, narrative filmmakers, and experimental artists to bring their projects to light.
R23 2342 | 910.962.3608 | hinshawk@uncw.edu
Associate Professor
R23 2324 | 910.962.2228 | johnsonm@uncw.edu
Associate Professor | CV
Juan Carlos Kase is a film historian whose ongoing research concerns the overlapping aesthetic, historical, and political registers of experimental cinema, documentary, art history, independent filmmaking, and popular music in the United States and elsewhere. He has published widely on avant-garde film, and in 2022–23 served as a curatorial fellow in the Canyon Cinema Discovered program. His current manuscript is “Post-Manson Cinema: Susan Sontag, Seventies Movies, and the Death Drive of American Culture.”
R23 2320 | 910.962.2507 | kasej@uncw.edu
Part-Time Faculty
R23 2308 | 910.962.7502 | mcnamaral@uncw.edu
Professor | CV
Dave Monahan teaches screenwriting, editing, and film production.
The short films Monahan has written, directed, and edited have screened at over 80 juried film festivals. The awards his films have earned included the New Line Cinema award for most original film, the Chicago International Film Festival Silver Plaque, and the Seattle International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for animated short.
Monahan is the author of Looking at Movies, an introductory textbook published by W.W. Norton & Company. His contributions as author include over 100 tutorial videos and interactive modules illustrating cinematic concepts and techniques. Looking at Movies is taught at over 300 colleges and universities in North America and the UK.
R23 2322 | 910.962.7544 | monahand@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor | CV
Qui Ha Hoang Nguyen’s research and teaching focuses on film history, politics and aesthetics, feminist decolonial historiography, Southeast Asian cinemas, and transnational flow of cinema. Nguyen’s current book project, Women in Vietnamese Revolutionary Cinema (1945 – 1975): Representation, Emotion, and Agency investigates women’s lived experiences, emotions, and multidimensional subjectivities on and off-screen in wartime Viet Nam. Her research has been published in journals and edited volumes Feminist Media Histories, Visual Anthropology, Film Stardom in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia on Screen, Southeast of Now Journal, among others.
Nguyen was a Postdoctoral Associate at Council of Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University where she taught Southeast Asian Cinema, Film and Media Studies Program. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California and B.A. from Viet Nam National University, Ha Noi.
R23 2344 | 910.962.3950 | nguyenq@uncw.edu
Senior Lecturer | CV
Glenn Pack is a narrative filmmaker that specializes in producing, directing and cinematography. His courses include: Introduction to Film Production, Film Tools and Techniques, Intermediate Narrative, Cinematography, and Narrative Senior Seminar. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Pack worked as a camera technician with Panavision International.
R23 2328 | 910.962.7882 | packg@uncw.edu
Part-Time Faculty | CV
An academic publishing specialist, Liza Palmer is managing editor of The Moving Image (published by the Association of Moving Image Archivists) and co-editor-in-chief of Film Matters (published by Intellect with support from the University of North Carolina Wilmington). Liza holds an MA in communication studies (concentration in film) and an MA in library and information studies, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include avant-garde film, citation ethics and bibliometrics, privacy, and freedom to read.
R23 2308 | 910.962.7475 | palmerl@uncw.edu
Senior Lecturer | CV
Dr. Sue Richardson specializes in popular culture, the rhetoric of film, and contemporary cinema, with an emphasis on Disney movies, cuisine in the cinema, genre study, and African American cinema and gender studies.
R23 2346 | 910.962.3326 | richardsongr@uncw.edu
Assistant Professor | CV
Dr. Priyadarshini Shanker's scholarship engages with Indian film and media focusing on the intersections of gender and cultural labor. More broadly her research, teaching, and curatorial practices map feminist media histories, adopting transnational and decolonial approaches, towards diversifying the film and media pedagogy.
R23 2312 | 910.962.2218 | shankerp@uncw.edu
Associate Professor | CV
André Silva's teaching specialties include 2D Digital Animation, Experimental Film and Environmental Documentary. His creative work considers the complex and layered relationships between the more-than-human world, virtual landscapes and states of consciousness. He serves as the coordinator for the Film Studies department's MFA in Filmmaking program.
R23 2334 | 910.962.2229 | silvaa@uncw.edu
Professor | CV
Shannon Silva is a multi-modal filmmaker from Austin, Texas. Fluidly moving through non-fiction, narrative, animation, and experimental modes, her films meditate primarily on issues of gender and class. Most recently, her work is contemplating the challenges of physical disability, cultural rituals of gathering, isolation, and the preserving effects of community.
R23 2338 | 910.962.2232 | silvas@uncw.edu
Administrative Associate
R23 2332 | 910.962.2057 | babsonl@uncw.edu
Equipment and Editing Suite Supervisor
University Film Center 1020 | 910.962.7369 | cavazosa@uncw.edu
Administrative Associate
R23 2302 | 910.962.7502 | kingk@uncw.edu