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Production Film Lab at NYU || Tuesday, October 17, 6:00PM
Transgenic Cinema: Collaborating with Scientists
Four filmmakers tell us about their collaborations with scientists
Five filmmakers will speak about their diverse collaborations with scientists. How are scientist-filmmaker collaborations initiated? In what ways do scientists and filmmakers look at the world similarly - or differently? How does one approach foreign disciplines? Get some insights as to the many forms that these partnerships may ultimately take. At the same time, we'll be learning about upcoming projects from our special guests. Open to the NYU community and the public.
Meet the filmmakers
  • Eliza McNitt
    Eliza McNitt is a writer and director of films and Virtual Reality experiences. Her unique voice as a director, fusing science with narrative storytelling has been supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, TED, Google, Intel, Samsung, VICE, and Time Warner OneFifty. Her films have played at festivals around the world including SXSW, Hot Docs, and Cannes NEXT VR.

    A top winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for her research on Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder, Eliza received the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering's Gerber Medal–the state's highest award for student science research–as well as special awards from The Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, MIT-Lincoln Lab, the Audubon Society, CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, Pfizer, the United States Armed Forces, the United States Air Force, and Connecticut Governor Jody Rell.

    Eliza is the recipient of over 50 film-festival nominations and prizes – including eight Best Film and Best Director awards. At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Eliza was the winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Production Grant for her film Without Fire which was filmed on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, starring Magdalena Begay (Drunktown's Finest) and Misty Upham (Frozen River, August: Osage County). Eliza's short film Artemis Falls starring Adepero Oduye (Pariah, 12 Years A Slave) was commissioned by TED and follows an astronaut on her journey into space.

    She is the creator of Fistful of Stars a Virtual Reality experience which drew over 6,000 people at BRIC! Celebrate Brooklyn and was the world's largest communal virtual reality experience to date. Eliza is an artist-in-residence with Time Warner OneFifty and a member of the New Museum's NEW INC, an incubator to foster innovative projects in art and technology.

  • Nancy Andrews
    Nancy Evelyn Andrews makes films, drawings, books and objects. Andrews is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in filmmaking. The Museum of Modern Art has collected six of her films, and her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliotheque Nationale and Franklin Furnace Archives. She completed her first feature film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes that premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015. This project was then developed as a web series when The Strange Eyes of Dr Myes was one of ten projects chosen to participate in Independent Film Project's (IFP) Screen Forward Labs.

    The Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Flaherty Seminars, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Film on the Rocks- Thailand, and others have presented her work. She was featured in the 2013 deCordova Biennial on exhibit.She is currently participating in Artists in Context's "Artists' Prospectus for the Nation" in the category of health, where she and other artists are bringing their aesthetic modes of inquiry to real-world situations, showing the value of drawing on knowledge from other fields and moving beyond conventional modes of problem-solving. Andrews is on faculty at College of the Atlantic.

  • Markos Kay
    Markos R. Kay is a digital artist, creative director, illustrator and lecturer with a focus in art & science.

    He is best known for his video art experiment aDiatomea (2007), exhibited at Ernst Haeckel's Phyletic Museum and the generative short film The Flow (2011) which even made it into a Breaking Bad episode. His art and design practice ranges from screen-based media, to projection and print.

    His work can be described as an ongoing abstraction and digitisation of the mysterious worlds of molecular biology and particle physics through a series of generative simulation experiments. These experiments explore the complexity and emergence of the invisible, and the computational paradigm of natural sciences.

    As a creative director and designer specialising in 3d and Motion Graphics, he has worked over the last 10 years for commercial clients such as: Apple, Fox, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Maserati, Ford, MTV, Nvidia, BBC, Vimeo and Channel 4. He has also created moving image works and illustrations for organizations that include: Belfast City Council, European Parliament, Howard Hughes Medical institute, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Playgrounds Design Festival. As a certified university lecturer he has taught design at the LCC, Chelsea College of Art & Design and University of Greenwich.

    In 2015, Markos founded multidisciplinary design consultancy and design studio Epoché.io with the aim to apply experimental approaches to branding, print-making, graphic design and animation.

  • Shawn Snyder
    Shawn Snyder is the by-product of a Suburban South Florida upbringing. After somehow sneaking through the hallowed halls of Harvard and emerging with a BA in Religion, he spent the greater part of his twenties on the road, largely as an itinerant singer/songwriter, always an an amateur anthropologist, pinballing between coasts and traveling as far afield as Australia.

    The last few years have seen a return to filmmaking and Shawn is now a graduate of NYU's Film Program. During his time there, he received both the Peter D. Gould Scholarship and the Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Scholarship. His pre-thesis film, Festus, won the 2014 CINE Golden Eagle Award for Best Student Drama and made some rather idiosyncratic rounds on the international festival circuit. His latest short, LULU, premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest in June 2015. And he's recently received 100k in production funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to direct his first feature, TO DUST, which was also a part of the 2015 IFP Emerging Storytellers slate. Additionally, Shawn was a 2014 IFP/Marcie Bloom Fellow. And he is a fairly beaming and brand new dad.
  • Emily Driscoll
    Emily Driscoll is a documentary director and editor, and the founder of BonSci Films, a production company specializing in science and art documentaries. She regularly produces short films for Science Friday, including the HHMI/SciFri series 'Breakthrough: Portraits of Women in Science' an anthology of six films featuring women in science across STEM fields. Recent episodes include a documentary about the scientists behind India's mission to Mars, the fluid dynamics of sneezes and toilet splatter, and how studying killer snails could lead to innovations in pain management and cancer. She's also produced videos for The World Science Festival, The Museum of the City of New York, Spectrum News, NBC Mobile, and artnet. Her award-winning independent documentaries have aired on PBS stations and screened at museums, film festivals, theaters and universities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Recent independent documentaries include 'ShellShocked: Saving Oysters to Save Ourselves', 'Invisible Ocean: Plankton & Plastic', 'Brilliant Darkness: Hotaru in the Night' and 'Masterpiece in a Mill Town'. Emily taught production at New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has a master's degree from the same program. If she's not producing and editing documentaries, you can find her on the badminton court.
Time and location:

Tuesday, October 17, 6:00pm
NYU Production Lab
16 Washington Place, New York, NY10003

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