David M. Monahan

Dave Monahan grew up in South Dakota, where his fascination with film form began as a teenage usher watching movies in the back of the theater. As an art major at South Dakota State University, he made sequential art – a tentative first step toward cinematic storytelling. Eventually, he studied narrative directing, editing, and screenwriting at Columbia University, where he discovered a love of teaching as a graduate teaching assistant, and later as an adjunct instructor at Parsons School of Design, Hunter College, and New York University’s graduate film program. The short films Monahan has written, directed, and edited have screened at over 80 juried film festivals. The awards his films have earned include 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 sole contributing author of Looking At Movies, an introductory textbook published by W.W. Norton & Company. Over the course of eight editions, he has created over 100 tutorial videos illustrating cinematic concepts and techniques for the book’s ebooks and website. Looking At Movies is currently taught at over 300 colleges and universities in North America and the United Kingdom. Monahan came to UNCW in 2001, and is proud to have served as Film Studies Department Chair (2011-2017), and MFA in Filmmaking graduate program coordinator (2019-2024).

Education

B.S. in Studio Arts, South Dakota State University
MFA in Directing (Film), Columbia University

Specialization in Teaching

Screenwriting
Editing
Multimodal Film Production

Research Interests

Film Form
Narrative Filmmaking
Documentary Filmmaking