Also a long-standing member of the Directors Guild of America and the ASC, Dickerson inspires as one of Hollywood’s leading creative minds and is bringing his expertise to the Dorothy Hirshon Artist-in-Residence hosted by the School of Media Studies from February 24-26, 2025.

https://event.newschool.edu/2025hirshonlectureseries

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peaCpUpwm2M

Christine Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award winner who co-founded powerhouse Killer Films with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over three decades, they have produced more than 100 films, including some of the most celebrated and important American independent features: KIDS, I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, HAPPINESS, BOYS DON’T CRY, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, FAR FROM HEAVEN, ONE HOUR PHOTO, STILL ALICE, CAROL, BEATRIZ AT DINNER, and DARK WATERS. In television, Vachon executive-produced the Emmy and Golden Globe-awarded miniseries MILDRED PIERCE for HBO as well as the Emmy Award-winning limited series HALSTON for Netflix. Recent releases include Todd Haynes’ MAY DECEMBER (Netflix), starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and Celine Song’s PAST LIVES (A24), which earned Vachon her first Oscar nomination in the Best Picture category this year.

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Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director whose work spans almost thirty years. His most recent documentary, MLK/FBI was released this January to universal critical acclaim.

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Throughout her work, Harron has been investigating stories about women in history, particularly the twentieth century, and how their lives have changed dramatically, depending on which era they came of age. Using the theme “The Past is Another Country” Harron shared her filmmaking process with New School students and engaged in a discussion of her work with Vladan Nikolic, Dean of the School of Media Studies, and with the online audience through a Q+A.

“This residency gives me a chance to stand back from the tumult of production and consider some of the questions that have preoccupied me in the last 25 years about creating stories about women—and sometimes men—in history,” Harron said. “I’m excited to hear what the students have to say about these ideas and to learn from them.”

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Raoul Peck’s documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, on the life of James Baldwin, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards and won the Audience Award at both the Toronto and Berlin International Film Festivals, LA Film Critics’ Best Documentary Award, the Best Documentary Award at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) (U.K.) and the French national film award, the César, among many others.

Raoul is one of the most significant and prolific filmmakers of our time. He has been richly rewarded for his historical, political, and artistic work. His work includes such films as The Man by the Shore (Competition, Cannes 1993); Lumumba (Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2000, HBO); Sometimes in April, on the genocide in Rwanda, which he produced and directed for HBO; (Competition, Berlinale 2005); Moloch Tropical (Toronto and Berlin); and The Young Karl Marx (Berlinale 2017). His documentary films include Lumumba, Death of a Prophet, and Fatal Assistance (Berlinale and Hot Docs 2013).

Raoul Peck held Master classes for Media Studies students, as well as screenings and lectures at The New School as part of his Hirshon residency.

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“Sean’s films resonate with our students and the type of filmmaking we foster at the School of Media Studies,” says Vladan Nikolic, the newly minted dean of the school. “While Sean has recently received well-deserved mainstream acclaim, he has been active for two decades, exploring themes and characters we rarely see as a society, including the ‘hidden homeless’ in The Florida Project and transgender protagonists in Tangerine. He proves that you can make strong films with a unique vision without big budgets about people on the margins of society.”

Cruising along Highway 192 in Central Florida, Sean Baker came upon the Magic Castle, a seedy, bright-pink motel in the outer orbit of Orlando’s Walt Disney World Resort. It was the perfect setting for his next film. The Florida Project, as it would later be titled, would explore the “hidden homeless”—people living hand-to-mouth in cheap motels after losing jobs and homes in the Great Recession.

However, a few days into filming, Baker hit a 100-decibel snag. A company selling helicopter rides set up shop right across the street from their location, wreaking havoc with deafening noise at all hours of the day.

“At first, it was a nightmare. The helicopters were taking off every ten minutes,” Baker told a class of students from the School of Media Studies recently. “We didn’t know if we could use the Magic Castle or not.”

Rather than change locations, Baker made a creative decision that follows from his documentary approach to narrative fiction filmmaking: He went with it.

“I can’t imagine the film without them now,” he said of the helicopters, which he incorporated as motifs in The Florida Project. “They’re a presence throughout the film, including the ending sequence, where they play a crucial role. It was a gift in disguise.”

Embracing “happy accidents” was one of the many pieces of advice the former New School student shared with School of Media Studies students in a master class, Finding Your Film.

In addition to leading two master classes, Baker hosted a public screening of clips from his films, including, most recently, The Florida Project, which won or was nominated for several awards during the 2017 award season; Tangerine, which follows a day in the life of two trans sex workers in Los Angeles; Starlet, which tells the story of a young woman who finds a fortune stashed in a yard-sale thermos; Prince of Broadway, the tale of a New York street hustler who meets the son he never knew he had; and Take Out, a film about undocumented Chinese immigrant workers in New York City, written and directed by Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, MA Media Studies ’10.

Baker is no stranger to The New School, having enrolled in editing classes at the university in 2000. It’s also where he met Tsou, who has been Baker’s production partner and artistic collaborator ever since.

“It’s amazing to see how far The New School has come; it was always a prestigious place to study, but now, 15 to 20 years later, everyone talks about it as a real destination,” says Baker, who, as a student, checked out filmmaking equipment to fellow students from the former School of Media Studies location at 55 West 13th Street.

While students gathered at the master class were eager to hear Baker’s advice, he questioned whether he was qualified to give it. The reason: To a large extent, he makes up his films as he goes along.

“It’s interesting to be in this position, because, generally, I don’t like giving advice—everyone has their own journey,” Baker said in an interview. “What I usually tell students is they’re about to set out on this journey, and it will be very unique and different from that of every other filmmaker. There’s no set formula.”

For Take Out, Baker assembled an ensemble cast of both professional and nonprofessional actors and shot without a full crew in an actual takeout restaurant during operating hours. The approach was liberating, allowing the filmmakers to focus exclusively on the acting and the story, and creating opportunities for “serendipity, happy accidents, and things we never could have expected,” Baker recalled.

“We learned a lot of lessons both on making a low-budget film and finding our film along the way,” he added. “We weren’t making it up, exactly, but we didn’t try to pre-visualize too much either.”

Tangerine evolved in a similar way. What began as a “log line” and a desire to shoot in a specific location—the intersection of North Highland Ave and Santa Monica Boulevard, the epicenter of Los Angeles’ red-light district for trans sex workers—became a 100-page screenplay. To realize the film, Baker eschewed enforcing a predetermined plot; instead, he listened to “voices of the community,” collaborating with locals who wanted to share their stories. One such story came from Kitana “Kiki” Rodriguez, who went on to become a co-star of the film.

“We were at a local Jack in the Box with Kiki when she told us she suspected her boyfriend of cheating on her,” Baker recalled. “She later found out that wasn’t the case. But the next time we met her, I said, ‘You know, I think there’s something there. If that turned out to be true, what would you have done?’ She told us she would have gone and found her at the brothel down the street. And then this fictionalized journey sprang from that.”

Baker encouraged students to embrace elements like the helicopters in The Florida Project, the bustling Chinese restaurant in Take Out, and Kiki’s story in Tangerine for what they are: gifts.

Said Baker, “That stuff is exciting—it’s allowing the real life and the real world to help you write your film.”

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Since 1972, Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno have worked to expand public access to electronic media through the Downtown Community Television Center in New York City. Driven by the belief that citizen access to media production strengthens democracy, the pair have provided free or low-cost production courses to diverse communities, as well as access to film equipment, for an estimated 75,000 young New Yorkers.

Alpert, a 16-time Emmy Award winner, and Tsuno shared their passion for expanding public access to media arts with The New School community as the School of Media Studies 2017 Hirshon Artists-in-Residence.

As part of their residency, Alpert and Tsuno led master classes for media and documentary studies students and presented a public lecture, Five Decades of Community Media from Canal Street to Cuba

“Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno’s DCTV community media project and filmmaking achievements are unparalleled in US community media education,” said Media Studies Dean Carol Wilder. “Their steadfast 45-year commitment to youth media and to progressive documentary filmmaking establishes them as the gold standard for community media engagement.”

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Since the early 1990s, Dove has produced unique and highly imaginative embodied hybrids of film, installation art and experimental theater. Exploring motion sensing and robotics in live mix cinema events, performers and participants in her work dynamically interact with unfolding narratives. Dove’s latest project, Lucid Possession, is a live cinema performance mixed and animated in real-time using cutting-edge motion-sensing technologies to perform complex layers of media. It presents a contemporary ghost story, or a poetic musing on noise management, and self-perception and fame across virtual and real social spaces.

Her work has been exhibited or performed at ZKM, the Museum of Moving Image, the ZERO1 Biennial, Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, the Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, The Kitchen, and many other venues and festivals.

Among other events during her residency, she participated in a panel, discussing with collaborators R. Luke DuBois, Art Jones,Leif Krinkle and Karen Young the haunted moments and entangled processes discovered in creating embodied hybrids of film, installation art and experimental theater.

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