Meet Our Faculty
Our faculty are working professionals connected to vast resources in the film industry. Learn more about the faculty of the MFA Film Program at CCNY.
Antonio Tibaldi
Program Director
Antonio Tibaldi has worked as writer/director in the film industries of Europe, Australia and North America since 1992, when he co-wrote (with Gill Dennis) and directed On My Own (Sundance 1993), nominated for 6 AFI awards (Australian Oscar Equivalent) and 1 Genie award (Canada’s Oscar equivalent). He has directed 6 other features, including Running Against (Sundance 1997, winner Cinequest and Prix Italia 1997, Prix Italia 1998 - Best TV film aired in Italy that year), and Little Boy Blue (winner Mystfest, Cattolica 1997).
His work has screened at festivals such as Berlin, Sundance, Tribeca, IDFA, San Sebastian, Rotterdam, Festival dei Popoli; and was released by companies such as Miramax, Warner Bros., and Lion’s Gate. In 2004 he started collaborating with UNTV (United Nations TV) shedding light on under-reported realities in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. In 2022 he directed the documentary Gorgona, filmed during 3 ½ years on the last prison-island in Europe, winner of “Best Italian Documentary” at Festival dei Popoli. That year he also co-wrote and directed a fiction feature film We Are Living Things, (Deauville, Slamdance) released by Juno Films and available on Amazon. He just completed a new documentary Without The Sea I Can’t Breathe, the second installment of a trilogy about confinement, exile and freedom.
His projects have received support from The Gotham, Tribeca Film Institute, Film Independent, Dokincubator, Eave, When East Meets West, Biografilm, New York State Council of the Arts. He studied Philosophy and Art History at the University of Florence, Italy; as a Fulbright scholar he received an MFA in Film at Calarts (California Institute of the Arts). Antonio is the recipient of the Maverick Spirit Award, the highest honor presented at the Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival; he is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film.
Andrea Weiss
Documentary
An internationally acclaimed nonfiction filmmaker and author, Andrea Weiss most recently co-directed The Five Demands, a feature documentary uncovering the little known story of a 1969 campus uprising by Black and Puerto Rican students that changed the face of higher education. The film won several film festival awards and was broadcast nationally on PBS in 2024. Weiss is also the director of Bones of Contention, a feature documentary delving into the historical memory movement in Spain and LGBT repression under the Franco dictatorship. Bones of Contention premiered in the Berlinale and won several film festival awards, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Valladolid, Spain. She is also co-director of Escape To Life, which premiered in the Rotterdam Film Festival followed by a European theatrical and television release. Other film credits include U.N. Fever, Recall Florida, I Live At Ground Zero, Seed Of Sarah, Paris Was A Woman, A Bit Of Scarlet, International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, and Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award).
Weiss’ nonfiction books include Paris Was A Woman (Counterpoint Press, 2013), winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Vampires And Violets (Penguin, 1993), and In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain (University of Chicago Press, 2008), winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. She has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts, as well as a U.S./Spain Fulbright Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University which honored her with a Distinguished Alumni Award.
Annie J. Howell
Screenwriting/Directing
Annie J. Howell is a filmmaker and professor. Her credits include co-writing the musical drama "Yellow Rose," (starring Eva Noblezada and distributed by Sony Worldwide), the recipient of eight Grand Jury Prizes for Best Narrative Feature; the original screenplay for "Little Boxes" (starring Nelsan Ellis and Melanie Lynskey, distributed by Gunpowder & Sky and Netflix); and two award-winning films co-written and co-directed with Lisa Robinson, "Small, Beautifully Moving Parts" (starring Anna Margaret Hollyman and André Holland) and "Claire in Motion" (starring Betsy Brandt). Howell's work has been shown at top film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Full Frame and the Hamptons, premiered in theaters nationwide, and featured on streamers around the world. She is the recipient of the Sloan Feature Film Prize, an IFP Emerging Narrative Award for Best Feature, an Almanack Screenwriters Colony residency, and a San Francisco Film Society/Rainin Foundation grant, amongst other awards. She has taught at institutions such as Duke University, The New School (where she was the founding director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies), Ohio University (tenured), NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Vermont College of Fine Arts and The City College of New York, where she received the Provost's Award for Outstanding Teaching. Howell grew up in the Arizona desert and is an alum of Whitman College (B.A., English) and NYU (M.F.A, Film). She lives in New York City with her family. More at www.linktr.ee/anniejhowell
Martina Radwan
Cinematography
Martina Radwan is an accomplished German-Syrian cinematographer. After moving to New York City in the mid 90’s, she DP’ed several fiction films before she developed a deep interest in documentaries. In 2024, she received an Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program for her DP work on Girls State. Her recent work includes Following Harry, One Person, One Vote?, Food and Country, The Fire that Took Her, Inventing Tomorrow, and The Final Year. Saving Grace, the 2012 Winner of both an Academy Award and an Emmy for Short Documentary, earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Cinematography. Her narrative work ranges from dramas like Rubaiyat Hussein’s acclaimed Under Construction, the first female directed feature in Bangladesh, to Gideon Raff's thriller The Killing Floor and horror film Train, as well as Maria Govern’s Rain, the first female directed Bahamian feature.
Continuing to push her own boundaries, Radwan directed two award winning shorts that played in national and international festivals, before she directed and produced Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, her first feature-length documentary as director. Martina is a member of the Academy and BAFTA Documentary Branch, as well as the Television Academy's Documentary Programming.
Tal Lazar
Cinematography
Tal Lazar is a cinematographer, producer, and educator with more than two decades of professional experience in fiction, documentary, and commercial work. His films have screened internationally and are distributed on major streaming platforms. He is the founder and former CEO of the New York–based production company MiLa Media.
Alongside his filmmaking career, Lazar has spent over fifteen years teaching at leading institutions, including Columbia University School of the Arts and the American Film Institute Conservatory. His workshops and courses are also available online through the Sundance Institute Collab, Berklee College of Music Online, and MZed.com.
Lazar is the author of Cinematography Beyond Technique (Routledge, 2025), a book that introduced a story-first approach to cinematography.
Jerry W. Carlson
MCA Department Chair & Cinema Studies Director
Jerry Carlson is a historian of narrative forms with special expertise in narrative theory, the history of the novel, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. From 2013 to 2022 he served as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College CUNY. In addition, at the CUNY Graduate Center he is a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Comparative Literature, and Film & Media Cultures and a Senior Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others. His current research is focused on how film and prose fiction from the Global South portray the histories and legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, he is an active producer, director, and writer with multiple Emmy Awards. As a Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created the series City Cinematheque about film history, Canapé about FrenchAmerican cultural relations, and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. As an independent producer, his work includes the Showtime Networks production Dirt directed by Nancy Savoca and Looking for Palladin directed by Andrzej Krakowski. In 1998 he was inducted by France as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He was educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (A.M. & Ph.D.).
Boukary Sawadogo
Documentary
Dr. Boukary Sawadogo is Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Media and Communication Arts at the City College of New York – City University of New York (CUNY). Also, he is a faculty member in the French doctoral program and the Certificate Program in Film and Media Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Sawadogo has teaching and research interests in African cinema and Black American cinema. As an African cinema and Black diaspora scholar, he has authored five books, including Africans in Harlem: An Untold New York Story (2022), African Film Studies: An Introduction. Second edition (2022), West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization (2019), African Film Studies: An Introduction. First edition (2018), and Les cinémas francophones ouest africains, 1990-2005 (2013). He held the 2024-2025 Stuart Z. Katz Professorship in the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York. In addition to his scholarship, Dr. Boukary Sawadogo is a media arts practitioner (a documentary film and a web-series on Africans in America) and the founding director of the Harlem African Animation Festival, the first festival in the United States that is exclusively devoted to African animated film and series.
JT Takagi
Sound Recording
JT Takagi (Orinne JT Takagi) is an award winning independent film maker and sound recordist. Her films are primarily on Asian/Asian-American and immigrant issues and include Bittersweet Survival, Homes Apart: Korea; The Women Outside; and North Korea: Beyond the DMZ, which all aired nationally on PBS with two programs on POV. As a sound engineer, she has recorded for numerous public television and theatrical documentaries with Emmy and Cinema Audio Society nominations including the Power (Yance Ford, Netflix 2024), Black Panthers: Vanguard of the revolution (Firelight Media/Stanley Nelson), the Emmy winning Strong Island and 70 other films. She also directs Third World Newsreel, a non-profit alternative media center, teaches at the New School and serves on the boards of both community and national organizations working on peace and social justice. She is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Wendy Lidell
Marketing/Distribution
Wendy Lidell has been a distributor of independent and international cinema for over 30 years. Most recently she was the Sr. Vice President for Theatrical Film Acquisition and Distribution for acclaimed arthouse distributor Kino Lorber Inc.,where she oversaw the release of 20 films per year including many award-winning and critically acclaimed titles such as Academy Award nominee Four Daughters; Bacurau starring Sonia Braga and Udo Kier, Test Pattern by Shatara Michelle Ford, nominated for three Independent Spirit and three Gotham Film Awards, and Bruno Dumont’s France starring Lea Seydoux. When the COVID pandemic forced cinemas to close in 2020, Lidell launched Kino Marquee, the first of its kind virtual cinema platform that offered customers digital access to first-run film releases.
Prior to Kino Lorber, Lidell was President of International Film Circuit, which she founded in 1987 with support from the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations. From 1999 to 2004, she headed the theatrical division of Fox Lorber, where she released major arthouse works including Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, François Ozon’s Under The Sand starring Charlotte Rampling, and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Lidell has conducted numerous Academy Award campaigns, five of which resulted in Oscar nominations. She is a graduate of Cornell University and a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Deirdre Fishel
Documentaries and Dramas
Deirdre Fishel is an independent director whose work primarily focuses on the lives of women and has been broadcast in 35 countries worldwide. Her most recent documentary, Facing the Wind (2024), about two women whose lives are irrevocably changed by their husbands’ diagnosis of Lewy body dementia and their growing friendship (DOC NYC 2024). Deirdre’s earlier feature documentary, Women in Blue (2020) about women officers working to reform the Minneapolis Police Department in the years leading up to the murder of George Floyd, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens. Her documentary Care (2016) which looks at the lives of elder care workers and their clients and how America’s care system is failing both, premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and was broadcast on America Reframed. Recent work has been funded by ITVS, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations, the Enterprise Fund, and the Tribeca Film Institute. Other projects include the groundbreaking documentary STILL DOING IT: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65, which premiered at SXSW; Suicide on Campus, a web documentary produced in conjunction with The New York Times Magazine; and Risk, a dramatic feature that premiered in competition at Sundance.
Campbell Dalglish
Screenwriting
Campbell Dalglish is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, poet, and professor of film at The City College of New York (CUNY). His PBS/ESTV feature documentary "Savage Land" (www.savagelandfilm.com) has won best feature documentary in ten international film festivals, as well as over 50 PBS Stations through ESTV. It was also screened under special invitation at the Toronto Visual Anthropology Film Festival (2023) and Ethnografilm Festival in Paris (2024). Dalglish’s narrative short films — including the award-winning "Road Kill," "Charade of a Fly," "Hard Way Out," and "Dance of the Quantum Cats" — have earned recognition for their inventive storytelling, community-based activism and visual style. His ethnographic film work includes over a dozen shorts broadcast nationally on The New Morning Show (2006–08), among them "Apache Womanhood," "Havasupai Falls," "Navajo Runner," "Temazcal (Sweat Lodge)" and "What the Elders Say."
A dedicated advocate for regional cinema, Dalglish serves as a Suffolk County Film Commissioner and is Co-Founder of The Plaza Cinema and Media Arts Center (www.plazamac.org) in Patchogue, New York, where he served as President from 2009 to 2021 and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees alongside Isabella Rossellini. Dalglish holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama (1986), where he studied under a three-year Playwriting Fellowship, and a BFA from the University of Colorado. He also attended Colorado State University (1969–70) under a fellowship for poetry.
Babak Rassi
Editing
Babak Rassi is a film editor with over twenty years of experience in feature films and documentaries as well as promotional videos and episodic TV. He has served as a technology integrator and post-production consultant for NYC filmmakers as well as companies like Tekserve, Avid Technology, and Apple. From 2002 to 2010, he oversaw post-production at Link-TV, a satellite broadcaster focused on world culture and music.
Rassi’s childhood home was a social hub for Iranian cineastes of the “Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults” (a.k.a. Kanoon). The profound simplicity and elegance of these short films, including that of Abbas Kiarostami, left a profound impression on him. As an educator Rassi aims to bridge that influence with established conventions of film editing and the emerging trends in post-production. He encourages student filmmakers to think critically, take risks and discover fresh approaches in crafting their stories.
His feature collaborations include Small Time, My Best Day, Looking for Palladin and documentaries Holy Land, Adam Fuss, A Landscape of Imagination, Varian and Putzi: A 20th Century Tale and Terre Vivante. Rassi has studied jazz composition, computer science, holds a BA in Communications from George Mason University and an MFA in Filmmaking from Florida State University.
David Briggs
Sound Design
David Briggs is a professional sound editor who in 2022 was nominated for an MPSE Golden Reel Award for his work on Severance (AppleTV), directed by Ben Stiller. Supervising Sound Editor credits include Palm Royale (AppleTV), Tokyo Vice (Max), Tales of the City (Netflix), Divorce (HBO), Hap and Leonard (Netflix); the documentaries Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage? (Disney), Dads, Do I Sound Gay?, Hunting in Wartime, Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger; the films Babygirl, A Kid Like Jake, 3 Backyards, My Best Day, Teeth. Other sound editing credits include Escape at Dannemora, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Moonrise Kingdom (Golden Reel nominee). He has sound designed numerous award-winning short films as well, including the 2014 Cannes Film Festival award-winning Oh Lucy! and the 2013 Canadian Genie Award winner Throat Song. He is a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild and the Television Academy, and holds an MFA in Film from New York University.
Dave Davidson
Professor Emeritus
Dave Davidson is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the Social Issues, Culture and The Arts whose work is recognized around the world. Davidson has directed over 30 films that have won numerous awards and have enjoyed wide distribution on television and the large screen. His first documentaries, “Cissy Houston-Sweet Inspiration” and “The Dancing Man -Peg Leg Bates” began a long and fruitful relationship with PBS, which included “A Place Out of Time” (Narrated by Rudy Dee) and “Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook”, on which he was Director of Photography and Co-Producer with Amber Edwards. Also with Edwards, he was Co-Director and DP on the feature “ Vince Giordano – There’s a Future in The Past”- a “Critics Pick” in the New York Times.
After 35 years at City College as a Professor and Founding Director of the MFA in Film, Davidson has returned to the world of film as a director, consultant and lecturer, conducting masterclasses at festivals in the U.S and abroad. His feature film, “Cinema and Sanctuary” completed a successful festival run in 2023. After its premiere at the Lincoln Center Cinema, the film took five awards at international festivals, including the “Harlem Spotlight Award” at the HIFF. In 2025, Davidson was the guest of honor at the “DOK#7” festival in Belgrade, Serbia for a week-long retrospective of his work. In early 2026, he produced and directed an evening of selections from his “Rescoring Richter” series, for Vassar College’s Modfest, featuring a mix of live performances by contemporary sound artists for classic Avant Garde films of Hans Richter and Davidson’s documentaries on creative process.
Chantal Akerman
(1950 – 2015)
Directing
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York. A prolific director, she is best known for her films Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1976), and Je Tu Il Elle (1974). The first of these was ranked the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 "Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll, making her the first woman to top the poll. (The latter two films also ranked in the same poll.)
At the age of 15, Akerman's viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired her to become a filmmaker. Akerman's first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. In 1971 she moved for a year to New York City, where she was exposed to the works of Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Michael Snow and began her long collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte.
Akerman subsequently moved to Paris where she worked for many years in different genres and media, including documentary, comedy, and video installation. Her work has been exhibited in the world’s most prestigious film festivals and art museums. In 2011, she moved back to New York City to join the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Film at the City College of New York as a Distinguished Lecturer, where she influenced, provoked and inspired film students until her death in 2015.
MFA in Film at The City College of New York
160 Convent Avenue (@ 138th Street)
Shepard Hall - Room 286
New York, NY 10031
Phone: 212-650-7235
Fax: 212-650-5734
Email: cityfilm@ccny.cuny.edu
The City College of New York, CUNY
