People
NIKLAS VOLLMER • DIRECTOR, PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Niklas Vollmer is an interdisciplinary artist and mediamaker who teaches film/video production at Georgia State University. Niklas received an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego, has been nominated for a Rockefeller Fellowship, and a recent documentary screened at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His experimental and documentary work has screened in the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, South America and Asia; and at AFI, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, and the Directors Guild of Los Angeles. Recent honors include being chosen as a Documentary Specialist (2009) and Filmmaker (2010) for the American Documentary Showcase, a program that brings recent American documentary films, filmmakers, and subject area specialists to audiences around the world via a cooperative grant by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State in collaboration with the International Documentary Association (IDA) and University Film & Video Association (UFVA).
Past distinctions include: Best Sports Documentary and the Original Vision Award at the International Documentary Challenge premiered at HOTDOCS, Experimental Faculty Juror Award from the University Film & Video Association, Best Short from United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival, Experimental Cinematography Award from the Trenton Film Festival, Experimental Runner Up at the Great Lakes Independent Film Festival, 2nd Place Documentary at the Savannah International Film Festival, Best Experimental at the San Diego Film & Video Makers Showcase, Finalist at the USA Film Festival, and 2nd Place Experimental at AFI’s Vision of US Competition.
Niklas has served as a Board Member of the University Film & Video Association. Before academia, he was a Public Television editor.
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DANIEL ROBIN • ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Daniel Robin (M.F.A., San Francisco State University, 2007) is a filmmaker who pushes the boundaries of documentary tradition. He has taught film and web video production courses at San Francisco State University and Cal State Monterey Bay University.
Robin’s recent film, My Olympic Summer, won the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking. The film has also won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the Florida Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the Nashville Film Festival, and best documentary short at a few other festivals. The film was also selected to screen at the prestigious New Directors/New Films Festival in New York. His other films have twice screened at Sundance, at the SXSW Film Festival and festivals in Bogota, Cartagena, Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Spain, Philadelphia, London, Atlanta, Baltimore, Humboldt, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere.
Filmmaker Magazine recently named Robin one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” a major honor.
Robin is also an innovative online artist, having pioneered web video in 2001, with 5 episodic web series to date, that can be seen at his website. Robin recently wrote an article about his experiences with web video for Movement, an academic journal out of NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Daniel was invited to present his web video work at the Amsterdam Worldwide Video Festival, and elsewhere. His many projects have received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Apple Computers, the Fleishbacker Foundation, the Film Arts Foundation, and is a recent recipient of a RIG grant through GSU for his current film The Rabbi and Cesar Chavez
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NATHAN ATKINSON • ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION
Nathan Atkinson (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2009) specializes in rhetorical studies, with particular attention to the manner in which visual images exert sensory influence in constituting public culture. His dissertation examined the images that were journalistically circulated in early Cold War newsreels, especially those of atomic testing, and he is at work revising the manuscript for book publication.
Atkinson’s research essays have so far appeared in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Language in Society, and in the Rhetoric Review. Other research is slated to appear later this year in Rhetoric & Public Affairs. His work has been widely presented at the main rhetorical studies associational meetings, including the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America (including its Summer Institute), and conferences held at CMU and Chicago. Dr. Atkinson earned Phi Beta Kappa membership while earning his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. At GSU, Atkinson coordinates the department’s core curriculum media literacy course (SPCH 2050).
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JENNIFER BARKER • ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION
Jennifer M. Barker, (Ph.D. UCLA; MA UCLA; BA University of Iowa) specializes in synaesthesia, sense perception and moving images, and cinematic tactility; theories of spectatorship, affect, and embodiment; documentary and ethnographic film; and intersections between film and the other arts.
She is the author of The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (University of California, 2009) and essays on cinematic spectacle, ethnographic documentary, and feminist experimental film.
ALESSANDRA RAENGO • ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION
Alessandra Raengo received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. Her research focuses on the visuality of race in American popular and visual culture within an intertextual, intermediatic, and interdisciplinary perspective. Her main areas of interest include Critical Theory, African-American Film and Visual Culture, Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Vernacular Theory, Marxist theory, and Semiotics.
She has co-edited (with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi) two multilingual volumes of Conference Proceedings of the Udine International Film Studies Conference (Italy) on The Birth of Film Genres and The Bounds of Representation; two volumes (with Robert Stam) on film adaptation from literary sources (Literature and Film, A Companion to Literature and Film) published by Blackwell; among the many scholarly translations she has also translated and curated the Italian edition of Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. Her essays, mostly concerning filmic representations of the epidermal signifier of race, appear in international volumes such Film’s Thresholds (Udine, Italy: Forum, 2004), and The Ages of The Cinema. Criteria and Models for the Construction of Historical Periods (Udine, Italy: Forum, 2008).