Future Filmmakers Workshop

Alrick Brown is Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Film and Television. An award winning writer and director, Alrick graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and a Masters of Education. He received his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  

Education is Alrick’s first calling, but he found his medium, film, after visiting the slave castle of Elmina, in Ghana, during a two-year tour with the Peace Corps in Cote d'Ivoire. The interactions with the people of his village, and his overall experiences in West Africa, informed his creative expression. An expression first fostered by his birth in Kingston, Jamaica and migration to, and upbringing in Plainfield, New Jersey. An activist and highly sought public speaker, Alrick’s commitment to social, political and economic justice, and revealing the heart of the world through the craft of storytelling is what draws audiences and peers to his work.  Alrick’s cinematic reach includes credits on the small screen as director, producer and writer on a variety of projects – ABC’s Final Witness, ESPN’s short doc series Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joint, and Investigative Discoveries Emmy-Award winning series A Crime Two Remember. His published work has appeared in the Huffington Post as well as the New Jersey English Journal.

Alrick’s collective body of film work has screened in numerous festivals worldwide, earning several honors. Among them is the HBO Life Through Your Lens Emerging Filmmaker Award for the critically acclaimed documentary Death of Two Sons. Alrick’s first feature, Kinyarwanda, was recipient of the prestigious Sundance World Cinema Audience Award.  He has previously taught undergraduate courses on the African American image in cinema at Rutgers University, film production at The Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, and at Goddard College where he was a faculty advisor for the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program.

With a background in poetry & playwriting, Susan-Sojourna Collier received an Emmy® Nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series for All My Children. A veteran television writer, Susan-Sojourna, has written for many daytime drama series, including All My Children, Port Charles, and One Life to Live. Susan-Sojourna partnered with the late Tommy Ford (Martin, Who Got Jokes & Harlem Night) to produce two films distributed by Lionsgate/Grindstone. The first feature film Conflict of Interest premiered at the Las Vegas Black Film Festival, BronzeLens Festival, and Peachtree Village International Film Festival. Presently, the film airs on Aspire TV and it is the highest-rated film on the network. The second feature, Switching Lanes, received the Best Feature honor at the Kingdomwood Christian Film Festival. Also, she pinned the screenplay Get the Show on the Road, an adaptation of a romantic comedy novel, which was a semi-finalist in the Tribeca Screenwriting Festival. Currently, she is finishing the documentary - Through My Lens: A Study of Bullying in the African American Community.

Susan-Sojourna is an educator and motivational speaker focusing on building self-esteem through writing. Most recently, she was awarded the Writer in Resident at Abu Dhabi Women’s College. She designed their Digital Storytelling course and edited the college’s first book of poetry – Insights into Emirati Life. She has taught screenwriting at School of Visual Arts, Syracuse University – Newhouse, and Georgia State University. She serves on Advisory Board for Authoring Action! Winston-Salem, NC (a nonprofit arts education & outreach organization) and a mentor for Girls Write Now, NYC (creative writing program for at-risk girls). She developed the creative writing workshop Messages to My Younger Brother/ Messages to My Younger Sister (addressing issues of incarcerated and youth-at-risk) which was implemented at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, Youth and Congregations in Partnership (Brooklyn) & Girls Re-Entry Assistance Support Project (GRASP). In addition, she is the co-founder of the Mamie and Jimmie Collier Writing Fellowship – established to identify and encourage emerging, talented, BIPOC playwrights and screenwriters through mentorship and writing competitions.

Courses

Feature Screenwriting, Writing the TV Teleplay, Dramatic Writing, Writing the Webseries, Short Screenwriting

Education

BA from Talladega College, MFA from Spalding University