The Graduate Film Department at NYU Tisch invites industry professionals to speak and sometimes screen their work Wednesday evenings during the academic year as part of the "Chair's Workshop" series.
Here is the list of participants for the academic year of 2020-21:
Academy-Award winning writer and renowned playwright Aaron Sorkin made his Broadway debut with A Few Good Men. His subsequent film adaptation was nominated for four Academy Awards and five Golden Globes, including Best Screenplay and Best Picture. Sorkin won the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, BAFTA, and Writer’s Guild Awards for The Social Network and received Academy Award nominations for his screenplays for Molly’s Game and Moneyball. His other films include Steve Jobs (Golden Globe Award), Charlie Wilson’s War, The American President, and Malice. Acclaimed across mediums, Sorkin created and produced The West Wing, which won 26 Primetime Emmy Awards, The Newsroom, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Sports Night, and the stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, now the highest-grossing American play in Broadway history. His newest film The Trial of the Chicago 7 is available on Netflix beginning October 16.
DGA Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Nicole Kassell has become a sought-after director in television following multiple episodes of critically praised series, including Westworld, The Leftovers, The Killing, The Americans, The Following and Rectify. Vulture called her second episode of The Leftovers “No Room at the Inn” the “Best TV Episode of 2015” and IndieWire’s named her one of the “Top 25 Directors working in TV”. Kassell most recently executive produced the HBO limited series Watchmen from creator Damon Lindelof. The show, based on the acclaimed graphic novel of the same name, stars Emmy and Academy Award winners Regina King, Jeremy Irons, and Louis Gossett Jr, as well as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Tim Blake Nelson, among others. Kassell, who won a DGA Award this year for her work on the Watchmen pilot, also directed episodes two and eight of the series. Certified Fresh at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, the series was honored with a 2020 Peabody Award, recognized as one of AFI’s “TV Programs of the Year” and nominated for a Critics Choice Award for “Best Drama Series.” The show recently earned a total of 26 Emmy nominations, the most of any show this year, including “Outstanding Limited Series” and an individual nomination for Kassell in the category of “Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special.” Next up, Kassell will direct the feature film Silver Seas for Participant Media, and she is attached to direct and executive produce The Last of the Mohicans series for HBO Max, alongside the writers Cary Joji Fukunaga and Nick Osborne. Kassell’s first feature film The Woodsman, which she co-wrote with Steven Fechter, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Newmarket Films. The Woodsman received a CACAE (Art House award) at the Directors’ Fortnight at The Cannes Film Festival; The Jury Prize at the Deauville Film Festival; a Humanitas nomination; and The Satyajit Ray Award at the London Film Festival. For her work on the film, Kassell was nominated for a Gotham Award (Breakthrough Director) and Independent Spirit Award (Best First Feature) and was recognized by Variety as one of ten “Directors to Watch.”
Treva Wurmfeld's feature directorial debut, Shepard & Dark, about playwright Sam Shepard, made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012 and won top awards at the Woodstock Int. Film Festival, the Cleveland Int. Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival. That year, Wurmfeld was included in Filmmaker Magazines 25 new faces of Independent Film. Shepard & Dark was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival and Wurmfeld was nominated for the Camera d'Or prize. Shepard & Dark was released by Music Box films in the Fall of 2013. Previously Wurmfeld shot and produced for the Emmy Award-winning A&E series Intervention and wrote and directed the short film, Oyster in 2007. More recently, she produced and directed a short documentary, The Hama Hama Way. She received her MFA from Hunter College, in 2006.
Julianna Brannum (Comanche) is a documentary filmmaker based in Austin, TX. Her first film, The Creek Runs Red, was selected to air on PBS’s national prime-time series, Independent Lens. She later co-produced a feature-length documentary with Emmy Award-winning producer, Stanley Nelson for PBS’s We Shall Remain – a 5-part series on Native American history. The episode, “Wounded Knee”, chronicled the siege of Wounded Knee, SD in 1973 led by the American Indian Movement and had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and later won the ABC News VideoSource Award for Outstanding Use of Archival in a Film. Ms. Brannum was selected as a Sundance Institute/Ford Foundation Fellow and has been awarded grants from the Sundance Institute’s Native Initiative, National Geographic, Women in Film, ITVS, the Oklahoma Humanities Council, Vision Maker Media, and the Sundance Documentary Fund for her public television documentary LaDonna Harris: Indian 101. She was also awarded a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Tribeca Film Institute in support of the film. The film aired nationally on PBS in November 2015 and was Executive Produced by Johnny Depp. Ms. Brannum most recently served as Series Producer on the PBS series, Native America” produced by Providence Pictures. This epic, 4-part series focuses on the civilizations of the Americas. Ms. Brannum has also produced programs for Discovery Channel, HGTV, DIY, A&E, and Bravo and is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma where she was awarded the 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award for the College of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Quahada band of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma.
Scott Frank’s screenplays include Little Man Tate, Dead Again, Malice, Heaven’s Prisoners, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, The Interpreter, The Lookout (also directed), Marley & Me, The Wolverine, Walk Among the Tombstones (also directed), Logan, the Netflix limited series, Godless (also directed) and The Queen’s Gambit (also directed). Out of Sight and Logan were both nominated for Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. Out of Sight won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America as well as Best Screenplay awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics. Logan was also nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Get Shorty was nominated for both a Golden Globe and a Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His directorial debut, The Lookout, won the Independent Spirit award for “Best First Feature.”Godless was nominated for 12 Emmy awards.
Mr. Frank is currently adapting the Maria Doria Russell novel, The Sparrow, into a limited series for director Johan Renck (Chernobyl) and F/X. Mr. Frank serves as an Executive Producer on the STARZ series Panther Baby based on Jamal Joseph’s autobiography about his life in The Black Panthers. He will direct the pilot and episodes of Twin Territories, a western series based on the life of African American lawman Bass Reeves for Amazon. He is also overseeing the writing and will direct episodes on Dept. Q, a British series for Left Bank (The Crown), based on the bestselling crime novels by Danish author, Jussi Adler Olsen. Mr. Frank and Tom Fontana have co-written a French series, Monsieur Spade, about the fictional detective, Sam Spade, living out his later years as an expat in the south of France in the early 1960’s. Mr. Frank’s first novel, Shaker, was published by Knopf in 2015.
Marielle Heller is an award-winning director, writer, actor and producer who has built an impressive and multifaceted career carefully constructing a unique and compassionate voice that has earned her critical acclaim. On the feature film side, she most recently directed A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. She previously directed the three-time Academy Award-nominated film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, just three years after the release of her highly lauded directorial debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which earned her an Indie Spirit Award. She is currently starring as Alma Wheatley in director and writer Scott Frank’s critically acclaimed and Netflix’s most watched limited series, The Queen’s Gambit alongside Anya Taylor-Joy.
Heller is also the founder of Defiant by Nature, a production company focused on telling stories that uplift, inspire and entertain while simultaneously shining a light on women and non-binary creators. In a first look TV deal with BIG BEACH, the company will develop and produce new series and specials for television, some of which Heller may direct, while also shepherding new voices and talent. The company’s first release was a filmed version of the Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony nominated play What The Constitution Means To Me, written and starring Heidi Schreck and captured by Heller now available on Amazon Prime. The company is also currently developing a TV mini-series based on the This American Life episode, “Five Women.”
Roger Ross Williams is an award-winning director, producer, writer, and the first African-American director to win an Academy Award with his short film Music By Prudence. His documentaries include Academy Award nominated and Emmy Award-winning Life, Animated, as well as God Loves Uganda, Emmy-nominated and Webby-winning VR experience Traveling While Black, and Emmy Award-winning The Apollo. Williams is currently working on his first narrative feature, Cassandro, produced by Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna’s production company La Corriente Del Golfo. Since 2016, Williams has been on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences representing the Documentary Branch and is also Chair of the Documentary Diversity Committee. Williams serves on the advisory board of the Full Frame Film Festival, and the boards of Docubox Kenya, None On Record, and the Zeitz Museum Of Contemporary Art Africa. He resides in NY and Amsterdam.
Terrance Daye earned his Master in Fine Arts in filmmaking from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, is a two-time Spike Lee Production Fund recipient, and a 2018 Sundance Ignite Fellow. His short film, Cherish: A Visual Poem, is a visually poetic portrait of a young Black boy in the South who navigates the mundane and discovers the miraculous, and was featured in episode 1 of One Story Up, the Topic Original series.
Haley Elizabeth Anderson graduated from New York University’s Graduate Film Program as a Dean’s Fellow. She is a 2019 Sundance Screenwriters Intensive Fellow and was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film. Her short film, Summer Animals, is a coming-of-age story about class, race, and jumping into other people’s pools. It was featured in episode 3 of the Topic Original series, One Story Up.
Lance Oppenheim is a filmmaker from South Florida, now based in New York City. His films have been screened at festivals across the world including Sundance, Rotterdam, Tribeca, True/False, and featured at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. Lance was a 2019 Sundance Ignite Fellow, named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and is the youngest contributor to The New York Times Op-Docs. He graduated from Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies program in 2019. His first feature, Some Kind of Heaven, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was produced by Darren Aronofsky, The New York Times (the paper’s first feature film production), and the Los Angeles Media Fund. The film was distributed by Magnolia Pictures in 2021 and received critical acclaim.
Shaka King is an emergent, auteur filmmaker with a body of work that spans the film and television arenas. King is the director, co-writer and producer behind Academy Award-nominated Judas and the Black Messiah, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya. The film, which marks his studio feature directorial debut, centers on Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and his fateful betrayal by FBI informant William O’Neal. King was recently nominated for a WGA Award on behalf of the film, and Kaluuya won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for his performance. The film has already been recognized by the National Board of Review and AFI has one of the top films of the year. King was also recognized with the Director Award at the Critics’ Choice Association’s Celebration of Black Cinema event this year. In 2020, he was selected as one of Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch in conjunction with his work on the feature. For television, King directed multiple episodes of Shrill for Hulu, and before that, was a writer and co-director on Random Acts of Flyness for HBO. Previously, he directed multiple episodes of People of Earth for TBS, as well as High Maintenance for HBO. He is the writer and director who won the coveted “Someone to Watch” honor at the Independent Spirit Awards on behalf of his feature directorial debut, Newlyweeds, which premiered at Sundance in 2013. King currently resides in New York.
Richards Cinematography credits include Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Winner The Rider, Songs My Brothers Taught Me for which he also won Best Debut Cinematography at the Camerimage Festival, and most recently Nomadland for which he is nominated for an Academy Award. Richards was nominated for a Critics Circle Award for best technical achievement for his second feature, BAFTA nominated God’s Own Country. Richards achieved his BA at Bournemouth University Film and Television School for Film and creative writing, before receiving his MFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he studied Directing. Richards has shot a wide range of commercials and music videos, collaborating with directors around the world. His work has screened at festivals worldwide including Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Telluride, Berlin, New Directors New Films, Telluride, and exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MOMA PS1 in NYC.
Dan Janvey is an Oscar-winning producer and manager responsible for some of the most critically-acclaimed films of the past few decades. Janvey is perhaps most known for his work on Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), for which he was nominated for the Oscar’s Best Picture. Most recently, Janvey was a producer on Nomadland, and won Best Picture the 93rd Oscars after only his second career nomination.
Mollye Asher is a producer and production manager, known for Nomadland (2020), The Rider (2017) and Swallow (2019). She is a New York-based producer and multiple Independent Spirit Award nominee. With a keen eye for auteur talent, she has produced films that have premiered at the top film festivals worldwide, garnering some of their most prestigious awards. Most notably, she produced the 2014 SXSW Grand Jury Prize winner, Fort Tilden (MGM/Orion), by writer/ director team, Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, Anja Marquardt’s She's Lost Control (Berlinale, CICAE Award, Monument Releasing), and Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Sundance, Cannes, Kino Lorber) by Chloé Zhao. he Rider premiered in the 2017 Directors Fortnight at Cannes where it took home the top prize and was sold to Sony Pictures Classics. Asher is a recent Sundance Catalyst fellow, an alumna of the Film Independent Producing Lab, IFP’s Narrative Lab, and she earned her MFA from NYU’s Graduate Film program.
Hao Wu’s documentary films have received funding support from The Ford Foundation JustFilms, ITVS, Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, NYSCA, and international broadcasters. His previous feature documentary, People’s Republic of Desire, about China’s live-streaming phenomenon, won the Grand Jury Award at the 2018 SXSW. Wu followed that film with All in My Family, a Netflix Original Documentary Short, that launched globally in May 2019. 76 Days, Wu’s latest work and the first feature documentary on the COVID-19 pandemic to play at a film festival, world premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2020. Distributed by MTV Documentary Films in North America, it was named a Critic’s Pick by The New York Times, and one of the Best Documentaries of 2020 by both The Washington Post and IndieWire.
Born and raised in China, Wu holds an M.Sc. degree from Brandeis University and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. From 2008-2011, he was a fellow at New America, a D.C.-based think tank. He is a member of the Documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Erik Messerschmidt was the director of photography on David Fincher’s passion project Mank in black and white, chronicling the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s turbulent journey to write Citizen Kane alongside Orson Welles. Messerschmidt’s meticulous and striking recreation of the period’s aesthetic earned him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, an ASC Award for Outstanding Cinematography in a Feature Film, a BSC Award for Best Cinematography in a Theatrical Feature Release, a Satellite Award for Best Cinematography in a Feature film, a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Cinematography, as well as Best Cinematography award nominations from the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle, the Broadcast Film Critics Association Critics Choice, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.
Hailing from a background in the fine arts world, Messerschmidt honed his skills while working with such renowned cinematographers as Dariusz Wolski, ASC, Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, Phedon Papamichael, ASC, Claudio Miranda, ASC, and Greig Fraser, ASC as well as numerous fine art and fashion photographers. He recently finished lensing the war-epic Devotion for director J.D. Dillard, based on the real-life story of a Black naval officer who befriends a white naval officer during the Korean War; both become heroes for their selfless acts of bravery. Erik also shot multiple episodes of the HBO Max original series Raised by Wolves from producer/director Ridley Scott, episodes of Noah Hawley’s Fargo and Legion as well as the first and second seasons of David Fincher’s hit thriller series Mindhunter for Netflix, earning a 2020 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series. He has also shot numerous commercials for international brands such as Chevy, Ford, Lincoln, and Amazon and Earned a Gold Frog nomination for his 2008 documentary In a Dream.