Three recent Department of Cinema and Digital Media majors from
the class of 2025 have launched their own videography and
video production company and have hit the ground
running. David Kouyoumdjian, Jihae Dong, and Ziyun
Zhang formed 175
Productions LLC (AKA. 175 Productions) in March 2025 and have
already built up an impressive list of clients.
The West coast premiere of Professor Julie Wyman’s
documentary The Tallest Dwarf will be part of
the San Francisco International Film Festival with
screenings on April 26 and 27.
For any anthropologist, fieldwork represents both a professional
obligation and a rite of passage. For Professor Fiamma
Montezemolo, as for Fred Murdock, the protagonist of
Borges’ El Etnógrafo (1969), this rite of
passage is a break and a crossing: a break from anthropology’s
traditional forms of expression and a crossing into the realm of
visual art.
Filmmakers and professors Glenda
Drew (of Design) and Jesse
Drew (of Cinema and Digital Media) have completed a project
decades in the making — a documentary about the roots of American
Country Music titled Open Country.
Lynn Hershman Leeson will be honored at the 2023 Mill Valley Film
Festival as a recipient of the
Mind the Gap Award for her visionary contributions to the
arts and lifetime achievements on October 8.
Recent alumna Sarah Sy (B.A., design and cinema and digital
media, ‘23) has received a scholarship through The Gotham EDU Film and Media Career
Development Program. The six-week summer program covers
development, pitching, marketing, distribution, and more.
In conjunction with the ten year anniversary of Verge’s
groundbreaking at 625 S Street in Sacramento, the Verge will
present “The
First 10yrs,” an inaugural biennial exhibition of works
produced during the first ten years of Verge’s Resident
Artist Studio Program (RASP).
Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media Lishan Az has been named an
Emerging Artist at The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
in San Francisco for the 2023–24 season. Lishan’s work is
titled Eugene’s Cove, and will be on view December 13,
2023, until March 3, 2024.
Associate Professor Julie Wyman has recently received a number of
honors over the summer. She is among the recipients of the 2022
American Stories Documentary Fellowships presented
by CNN Films and Points North Institute for her
Untitled Dwarfism Project. The fellows each receive
a grant to support production or post-production costs.
Artnet’s Tim Schneider has
named professor emerita Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Twisted Gravity”
one of the most boundary-pushing works at this year’s Art Basel.
Professors Glenda Drew, design, and Jesse Drew, cinema and
digital media, and lecturers Alexa Bonomo and William Mead,
design, have created work that is featured in the installation
“memory.unshift( )” at the Axis Gallery in Sacramento.
In a recent San Francisco Chronicle Dateline feature, Tony Bravo
highlights the numerous contributions San Francisco artist and
professor emerita Lynn Hershman Leeson has made to the
contemporary art scene.
The
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts will hold a discussion on
technology and the female body on Saturday, March 5 at 3 pm with
professor emerita Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp appears in the new
film Ten-Cent Daisy which has its world
premiere at this year’s Urbanworld Film Festival’s silver
jubilee in New York. The film will be shown Oct. 2 at 12:45
p.m.
The Cruess Hall renovation has been completed and includes new
labs and facilities for students in the Department of Cinema and
Digital Media. Scheduled to open in fall 2021, the new spaces are
the Media Lab, Alt-Ctrl Lab and two screening rooms.
Due to technical difficulties, the May 20 Film Fest @ UC Davis
program has been rescheduled for May 27 at 7 p.m. PDT, with a
Q&A and awards presentation to follow.
The festival features short films of eight minutes or less in
length, submitted by UC Davis students and recent graduates.
Submissions include a variety of genres, from animation to live
action to documentary to experimental. This year the
selection committee has also accepted submissions of original
screenplays of eight pages or less.
Senior Maddie Matsumoto won an Honorable Mention in the
One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest for her animated, 1.5-minute
film, Bee the Solution. Her film will screen online
at
6:30 p.m.(CDT) Saturday, April 24, as part of the Earth Day
Mini Film Fest, along with 6 other Honorable Mention winners.
