Writing

Below is a sample of my published writing, featured in The Media School's Alumni Stories and School News pages, IU Cinema's A Place for Film blog, and the Indiana Daily Student. More of my work can be accessed through each publication.

Faculty, student, alumni Bicentennial projects celebrate IU

IU’s Department of Journalism was born in 1911, 91 years after IU and 105 before The Media School opened its doors in Franklin Hall. Students had already been hard at work reporting on community and campus goings-on for the Daily Student for several decades...
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IDS’s Black Voices is ‘scratching the surface’ of institutional racism

Few of the students iedia, Race and Justice course had ever heard of the Black Press. Black Americans began telling their own stories, in their own papers, on their own terms nearly 200 years ago. Often Black-owned, Black publications centered Black issues on a local, national and international scale and wrote specifically to a...
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Gillespie reflects on ‘the art of Blackness’ in Naremore lecture

Andre Seewood felt like he had conducted a summons. It was February and Seewood, a Media School doctoral candidate and award-winning filmmaker, was reading Michael Gillespie’s book, “Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film,” when he learned Gillespie would be delivering the 2021 James...
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Greg Sorvig of Heartland Film on rising above 'the Band-Aid year'

An atypical year meant an atypical workplace. Greg Sorvig, BA’06, artistic director for the Indianapolis-based Heartland Film, found himself watching and confirming festival submissions from his basement.The main room of that basement is subdivided: a playroom for his daughters on one end, a television and...
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Alumni ‘film wives’ draw on healing process to create poignant stories

Just over a year ago, Katherine Crump and Riley Dismore, the two halves of Film Wives Productions, were at the Cannes Film Festival to represent their film “.” Written and directed within the span of a week for 2018’s Campus Movie Fest, the short tells the story of a woman slowly grappling with a painful realization...
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‘5,000 Acres,’ ‘StalkHer’ win top awards at Montage Film Festival

The second year of the annual Montage Film Festival looked a little different from its first.The music still played, the IU Cinema logo still flashed across the screen, but audiences watched from the comfort and safety of their homes rather than the cinema. On Thursday, April 30, the show went on...
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Artist to Auteur: The Cinema of Kate Bush

It hardly needs saying that Kate Bush’s landmark art rock fantasia Never for Ever remains a milestone in a legendary career. After breaking out at 18 with the sensational “Wuthering Heights” and following it with a whopper of a debut album, The Kick Inside, mere months later and a follow-up, the steady though less stunning Lionheart, the following year, the songstress...
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Remembering In the Mood for Love: Wong’s Masterpiece Turns 20

The unremitting power of memory has always been central to the films of Wong Kar-Wai — stories of lost love and deep yearning that hinge on their capacity to channel something specific and powerful about the way time renders the most fleeting encounters with love profound. And if there’s one memory even the...
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There’s Still A Ways to Go: Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World and Life on Pause

As the early days of pandemic-necessitated isolation stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, and as it gradually became clearer and clearer that life as we knew it would never return and whatever semblance of it we could return to remains far out of reach, I found a...
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REVIEW: ‘High Life’ is a stunning space oddity

In the midst of "High Life," the strange, elliptical and altogether otherworldly new film by legendary French filmmaker Claire Denis, a stern Juliette Binoche remarks that "there is nothing to fear." She's wrong.The movie, which follows a team of death row inmates corralled onto an interstellar prison and sent hurtling toward a...
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Hawkins reflects on impact of filmmaker Agnès Varda

Associate professor Joan Hawkins first came to know the work of Agnès Varda in the ‘80s, when she saw the French film icon’s 1962 drama “Cléo from 5 to 7.” Hawkins was working on her doctorate at UC Berkeley. In those days the culture as a whole was struggling mightily to recover films by women. “There weren’t...
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Francis book explores prismatic presence of Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker introduced Terri Francis to the world of cinema.They “met” in Paris, around the turn of the century — decades after Baker’s death. Francis was researching her dissertation on Black American expatriates in Paris, and Baker was a recurring subject in books and conversations. “People had been talking...
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