Cinema Studies

Current Faculty

Tracy Cox-Stanton
B.A., University of West Florida
M.A., Ph.D., University of Florida
tcox@scad.edu

Chad Newsom
B.A., The University of Memphis
M.A., Savannah College of Art and Design
Ph.D., University of Florida
cnewsom@scad.edu

Roger Rawlings
B.A., Hunter College
M.A., New York University
Ph.D., City University of New York
rrawling@scad.edu

Current Students

Benjamin Barbour received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he double majored in English and Film & Television Production. He is currently an M.F.A. Film & Television Production student, as well as an M.A. Cinema Studies student at SCAD. His life-long passion (and obsession) has been the study and making of horror films. He aspires to teach, write, and direct.

Scotty Barnhart was born and raised in Elkins, West Virginia. He received his B.A. in English from Davis & Elkins College in 2009. He was the Graduate Assistant for the SCAD Cinema Studies department between 2011-2013. He was also Student Editor for Issues 2 and 3 of The Cine-Files online journal, as well as this departmental blog. He’s currently completing his master’s thesis, which is a close reading of James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933). He resides in the suburbs of Savannah with his wife, Erin, and dog, Maxwell.

Winona Caesar received her Bachelor’s degree in American Studies with a History minor and Media and Communication Studies certificate from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is interested in things usually left out in films, especially minority groups and interracial parings.

Claire Clayton is from Asheville, North Carolina. She received her B.A. in Professional Writing with a minor in Creative Writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is now pursuing her M.A. in Cinema Studies from SCAD.

Steve Drum lives in Savannah, Georgia, with a cat and husband. In 2009, Drum earned his B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University. He is earning an M.F.A. in Writing and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is working on a history of Jim French’s Colt Studios, told from the perspective of former models. His writing has been published in The Huffington Post, The St. Sebastian Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The Wordstock Ten and The Gertrude Press Journal.

Kristin Galvin received her B.F.A. in Film and Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she is currently completing her M.A. in Cinema Studies. She resides in Atlanta with her husband and domesticated feline companion, where she is working for the Turner Broadcasting Corporation’s Studio Division.

Ashley Falls is from Liberty, Kentucky. She received her B.A. in English with a focus on Creative Writing from Northern Kentucky University. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Cinema Studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She loves all genres of film, and is extremely interested in film criticism and journalism. She recently wrote her first novel and hopes to publish it. She currently resides in Savannah with her husband, Michael, and two daughters (dogs), Penny Lane and Sage.

Eugenia Hannon received her B.A. in Literary & Cultural Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2010. Her major academic interests include (but are not limited to): psychoanalytic film theory, vagina dentata, Jaws (1975), and the “body.” In her spare time she likes to drink beer, eat pretzels, and watch Law & Order: SVU.

Stacey Haynes is from the Southeast. In addition to his involvement in Cinema Studies, he is an aspiring screenwriter, and hopes to start his own production company one day. | http://sdcs.wordpress.com

Allison Leonard was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a small town outside the city of Pittsburgh. She attended college at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she earned her B.A. in Film Studies. A theater actor since childhood, she started performing in small films after college, and recently got the opportunity to be an extra in the big-budget blockbuster film The Avengers (2012). She enjoyed her film set experiences so much that she is now pursuing her graduate studies at SCAD for a dual degree for an M.A. in Cinema Studies and an M.F.A. in Film & Television. She loves nearly all forms of cinema, but she particularly enjoys horror, crime/gangster, and East Asian films. Aside from acting and studying films, her hobbies include reading, playing video games, and kendo (a Japanese sword-fighting sport). She hopes to become either a film critic or a college professor.

Jae Matthews was born in Upstate New York to a retired preacher and a civil servant. She attended SUNY-Purchase Film Conservatory for her B.F.A. in Film Production, and journeyed all the way down to Georgia for an M.F.A. in the same sport at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Jae is currently studying for an additional degree in Cinema Studies and trying to acquire a Southern accent. Her interests lie in sexuality, representation, and class culture.

Rachelle Murphy received her B.A. in Media Studies from Sacred Heart University in 2008. She has worked professionally in Television and Film since 2007. Some of her credits include A&E Biography, WWE’s Monday Night RAW, and the Discovery Channel series Auction Kings. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Cinema Studies at SCAD. Her academic interests include film festivals, audience demographics, and New Historicism. Her future plans include working for film festivals and pursuing a doctorate.

Steven Nyberg was born in West Berlin, Germany, where his parents were stationed with the U.S. Army. During his childhood he moved several times up and down the East Coast. He’s lived in the Savannah area since 2004, graduating from Georgia Southern University in 2011 with a B.S. in Multimedia Communications and a minor in Theatre. Steven has studied with both the Uprights Citizen Brigade and The Second City. He is pursuing an M.F.A. in Film & Television and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

John Kelly Shelburne was born and raised in Mississippi. He received a B.A. in Film, Radio, and Television with an emphasis in Film from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2009. He is completing his M.A. in Cinema Studies, as well as his M.F.A. in Film and Television. His career goals are to be a film editor, journalist, and film historian.

Meg V. Snead hails from the smokey mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. She moved to Savannah in 2007 to pursue her passions of film and photography. She graduated from SCAD in spring 2011 with a B.F.A. in Film and Television. Her concentrations lay in fine art photography, cinematography, cinema studies, as well as camera, dolly, and steadicam operations. She is currently enrolled at her alma mater in the M.A. program in Cinema Studies, in addition to the M.F.A. program in Film and Television. She plans to continue her education by pursuing her Ph.D. in Journalism. Meg also dabbles in multimedia such as collage, pixilation, and stop motion. She enjoying singing, writing original songs, and covering rhymes of the hip-hop greats on her ukulele.

Chele Tai has lived in New York City, Paris, and South Africa. She currently lives in Savannah, where she is completing her M.A. in Cinema Studies.

Kyle Taubken was raised in northern Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee. Always interested in theater, literature, and film, he began acting in high school theater before moving into film editing early in his undergrad career. Beginning in TV news, he decided to venture into narrative film, writing and directing five short films from 2008-2011 before beginning graduate school. Taubken holds a B.A. in Mass Media from Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, TN, and is pursuing an M.F.A. in Film and Television Production and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA. He continues to write, direct, edit, and produce personal films alongside films assigned as class projects.

After working full-time with black bears in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Melanie Trichel decided to head back into civilization and become a “professional student” . . . for the rest of her life; that was in the late 1990s. Today she is a career adviser at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She’s also pursuing her M.A. in Cinema Studies. She has an A.A.S. degree in Theatre Education, as well as a B.F.A. from SCAD in Video and Film with a minor in Theatre. She also spent three glorious years teaching English in and eating her way through Japan (long before Eat, Pray, Love). Her passions and interests are studying and teaching higher education, documentaries, food, and her two pit bull rescues, Leonard Nimoy and Jeff Goldblum.

Vernon X. Williams is a native of Washington, DC. He graduated in 2011 from Benedict College in Columbia, SC, with a B.A. in Mass Communication-Broadcast. He is now a graduate student at SCAD, pursuing a master’s degree in Cinema Studies.

Alumni

Ryan Babula is a film archivist at Nuray Pictures in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Alex Beeman.

Sheila Lynne Bolda is Programming Director for the Savannah Film Festival.

Ian Bostick is a film archivist at Nuray Pictures in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Britt Faulkner earned dual master’s degrees in Film and Television and Cinema Studies from SCAD. She currently works at Marlborough College, an independent English school, where she is responsible for creating video news content, managing the external website, running the lacrosse program, and living in a boarding house as a residential tutor.

Mary Feld is completing her Ph.D. in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University, where she is also a teaching and research assistant.

Ryan Fernandez is a film archivist at Nuray Pictures in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Hannah Frostman.

Michael Hofstein teaches in the Film and Television program at SCAD.

Keller Jones teaches Film Studies at The Learning Center in Savannah, GA. She also paints southeastern landscapes and portraitures. She recently wrote Crickets, Tree Frogs, and Cool, Black Water (publication pending).

Kyle Maddux-Lawrence is a film archivist at Nuray Pictures in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Chad Newsom teaches in the Cinema Studies program at SCAD.

Duncan Pittman divides her time between teaching and advising undergraduate students of Film and Digital Media at SCAD, working as a cinema programmer and critic, freelance festival panelist and blogger, and moderator for quarterly screenings for the SCAD Cinema Circle film series.

Jillian Schlake.

Andrew Terhune is completing his Ph.D. in English from the University of Oklahoma.

Jonathan Waldrop is a film archivist at Nuray Pictures in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Meaghan Walsh-Gerard is the Managing Director of the Lucas Theatre for the Arts in Savannah.

Aaron Weiss currently resides in Valrico, FL, and is working on freelance video production and website development. On the side, he is writing movie reviews for Cinema Funk and plans to enter a doctorate program to continue studying cinema.