One weekend last month, members of the Notre Dame community sat down to watch 16 films, ranging from comedies to dramas and documentaries, in one evening. But these movies weren’t made in Hollywood. That’s because the 23rd annual Student Film Festival showcased the work of many students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.
A movie produced and co-written by University of Notre Dame alumnus John Hibey ’05 was awarded the jury prize for short filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The winning film, Fishing Without Nets, tells a tale of a poor, young Somali fisherman who ends up joining a group of pirates.
The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music will celebrate Franz Schubert’s 215th birthday on Friday, February 3, with an afternoon of music by the famed Austrian composer. The event, called Schubertiade, will take place from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in the O’Shaughnessy Great Hall and features performances from faculty and students, as well as readings chosen by J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music Susan Youens, an expert on Schubert’s work.
The Notre Dame Student Film Festival returns to campus January 19 to 21 (Thursday to Saturday) at 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. in the Browning Cinema at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. Tickets can be purchased at the ticket office, 574-631-2800 or online at performingarts.nd.edu.
Dan O’Brien ’99 has always considered himself an actor and now he is a successful professional. As a lead on the NBC sitcom Whitney, he can share his passion for performance with all of America. O’Brien says he did not major in theater at Notre Dame because he knew already that his passion was for acting and he was not particularly interested in the technical and behind-the-scenes work which the major entailed. Instead, he participated in the College of Arts and Letters’ Program of Liberal Studies and took as many acting classes as he could.
The anonymous loan of a rare 17th-century Northern Italian chamber organ—installed in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Reyes Organ and Choral Hall in 2011—is transforming students’ understanding of early Italian music, says Craig Cramer, professor of music.
The University of Notre Dame’s annual ScreenPeace Film Festival will kick off with a powerful film about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. On the Bridge, directed by College of Arts and Letters faculty member Olivier Morel, explores the impact of PTSD on former soldiers as they adapt to life outside of combat.
The Ambrosiana Collection, housed in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, was created through an agreement between His Eminence Giovanni Battista Montini, then the cardinal–archbishop of Milan (later Pope Paul VI) and President Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. The collection includes microfilms and photographic copies of nearly all of the drawings in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy’s historic library founded in 1609.
Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy and co-director of the Master of Sacred Music program at the University of Notre Dame, has won the biennial ACE/Mercers’ International Book Award. The award from Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) recognizes Fassler’s 2010 book The Virgin of Chartres: Making History Through Liturgy and the Arts as “an outstanding contribution to the dialogue between religious faith and the visual arts.”
In July 2012, scholar, conductor, and interdisciplinary artist Carmen-Helena Tellez will join the University of Notre Dame as a professor in the Department of Music and in the Master of Sacred Music program in the Department of Theology. She comes to the College of Arts and Letters from Indiana University Bloomington, where she was the director of graduate choral studies in the Jacobs School of Music
The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe fell on December 12, 2011 agreeably apposite to recent activities of Notre Dame’s scholars and administrators.
Electronic music roars and pulsates throughout the theatre. On stage, a blind man paces, struggling to escape the ring of steel bars that confine him. Meanwhile, a stern figure in a sleek suit and sunglasses stands guard. When the lights dim and dialogue begins to flash above the stage from an overhead projector, one thing is clear: This production of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes is far from ordinary.
Each year, International Student Services & Activities (ISSA), in conjunction with other campus departments and organizations, hosts International Education Week (IEW) at the University of Notre Dame. IEW is a national event that is coordinated by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to celebrate and promote global exchange between the United States and other countries. This year, IEW will take place November 14 to 18 (Monday to Friday).
Robert Sedlack, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History and Design, recently won two American Graphic Design Awards for University-related projects. Graphic Design USA magazine honored Sedlack ’89 for his work on the Parallel Currents exhibition catalogue for the University’s Snite Museum of Art and for Words for Painting, an artist’s monograph showcasing the work of Notre Dame Assistant Professor Jason Lahr.
Intersecting cultures. Family heritage. Art. Love. Money. All these themes work their way onstage in Provenance, a new play by Anne García-Romero, a Moreau Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre (FTT).
Is the Bard a fraud? Is someone other than William Shakespeare the true author of the some of the most revered works of English literature, as the upcoming movie Anonymous suggests? “Absolutely not,” according to University of Notre Dame Shakespeare expert Peter Holland, the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies and Associate Dean for the Arts.
A pair of documentaries by 2011 graduates of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre are “cleaning up” on the film festival circuit.
The University of Notre Dame Band will be presented with the prestigious Sudler Trophy at halftime of the Notre Dame vs. Air Force game on Saturday, October 8 in Notre Dame Stadium. The Sudler Trophy is considered the Heisman trophy of college bands.
Olivier Morel was in his car one day when a story came on the radio about suicide among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the report, eight to 10 veterans were taking their own lives each day. The news was like a punch in the stomach for Morel, a Notre Dame faculty member whose research focuses on fiction and trauma. “I was trembling,” he recalls. “I was angry, and I felt helpless … I was thinking, ‘This is unacceptable.’”
There is growing recognition in academia that “screen literacy” is a valuable asset for many scholars—especially those who teach language and literature. To help develop this skill set, the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) has created a new graduate minor in screen cultures. It is open to students in any Notre Dame graduate program.
The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) will present four plays in its 2011-12 season, beginning Thursday, September 29, with The Secret in the Wings by Mary Zimmerman.
Meet the Press. Steppenwolf Theatre Company. NBCUniversal. MTV. National Geographic. The Jimmy Kimmel Show. CNN. Entertainment One. NFL Films. Television stations from coast to coast. These are just some of the places where students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) intern as undergraduates, developing industry experience, making invaluable contacts, and getting exposure to a wide variety of career opportunities.
Jason Laws is a man who writes his own story. When the job he wanted didn’t exist, he created it. Since receiving his political science degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2007, Laws has built a successful career in Chicago as a commercial choreographer, creative director and producer. He’s also carved a niche for himself creating flash mobs—a concept that wasn’t even invented until 2003.
At this summer’s Venice Biennale—often called the Olympics of the contemporary art world—the U.S. pavilion features a musical ATM, a treadmill atop an upside-down World War II tank, and gymnasts performing routines on airline seats. It was Notre Dame graduate David Hunt’s job to turn the unusual visions of Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla into reality.
Christine Becker, an associate professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has received the 2011 Michael Nelson Prize from the International Association for Media and History for her book It’s the Pictures that Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950’s Television.
The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival (NDSF) will present Pericles by William Shakespeare as part of the 2011 International Youth Arts Festival from July 3 through 11, 2011. Directed by NDSF Ryan Producing Artistic Director Jay Paul Skelton, the production features an international cast and crew that includes two students from the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.
When Notre Dame senior Dan Jacobs signed up for an elective while studying in London last year, he wasn’t expecting that his course selection—seemingly unrelated to his industrial design major—would spark the idea for his B.F.A. thesis project, or potentially help thousands of children.
To explore the interplay between one television director’s work and the fan culture it inspires, Notre Dame seniors Stephanie DePrez and Ellie Hall traveled to Southern California on Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grants from the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
Raise the curtain, cue the lights, and enter our scene: an actress who discovers a hidden passion for costume design, a dedicated designer who seizes a prime opportunity, and the department where it all happens. This is the true story of seniors Lucy Lavely and Robert Jenista, theatre students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT), who played major design roles in the spring 2011 production of Proof.
The Elect, a documentary by University of Notre Dame undergraduates Erin Zacek and Dan Moore, has been selected to screen at the prestigious Los Angeles Film Festival.