Jan Millsapps | |
---|---|
Born | Concord, North Carolina, U.S. | February 26, 1950
Occupation |
|
Nationality | American |
Education | University of North Carolina at Charlotte (BA) Winthrop University (MA) University of South Carolina (PhD) |
Genre | Fiction |
Spouse | Phill Sawyer |
Website | |
janmillsapps |
Jan Millsapps (born February 26, 1950 in Concord, North Carolina) is an American digital filmmaker, fiction writer, and Professor Emerita in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. [1] She has produced films, videos and interactive cinema on subjects ranging from domestic violence to global terrorism, and has published in traditional print and online venues.
Throughout her career, Millsapps has focused primarily on women's issues. Her Episodes project, [2] co-produced in 1995 with La Casa de la Madres and funded by the Creative Work Fund, [3] featured a virtual house in which women shared true stories of surviving domestic violence. The interactive kiosk was installed at San Francisco City Hall, the San Francisco Public Library, at several Bay Area Kaiser Permanente medical centers, and was also presented at the National Latino Health Conference in Washington, D.C. Her multimedia installation Coverage, a feminist response to 9/11 and its aftermath, was the featured installation at the 2002 Mill Valley Film Festival. [4]
In 2007 she published her first novel Screwed Pooch, about the Soviet space dog Laika. [5] Her second novel, Venus on Mars, was published in 2014; one character in this book is based on the astronomer Wrexie Leonard, who was Percival Lowell's assistant. [6]
In 2013, the private spaceflight organization Mars One selected her as one of 1058 astronaut candidates (out of more than 202,000 applicants) who are embarking upon two years of rigorous testing to determine which ones will be among the first humans to colonize Mars, beginning in 2025. [7] She continued to explore her interest in space travel in her subsequent film, Madame Mars: Women and the Quest for Worlds Beyond, [8] a documentary tracing women's progress toward equity in the outer space arena. Millsapps premiered the film at the United Nations UNISPACE + 50 event in Vienna, Austria. [9] She also presented the film at the University of Cambridge [10] and at the New York Academy of Sciences. [11] The film's broadcast premiere on KQED-TV was March 22, 2019, as part of the network's Women's History Month Programming. [12] The film was awarded first place for a professional documentary at the 2019 Raw Science Film Festival. [13] The film also received a Director's Choice award at the Black Maria Film Festival [14] and a Best of Fest at the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, [15] and was also screened at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, [16] and at Doclands, [17] the California Film Institute's docs-only festival.
In 2020 the Madame Mars film was chosen for the American Film Showcase, co-sponsored by the US State Department and the University of Southern California, and has been shown at selected sites in Egypt, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Jakarta and Germany.
In 2021 she was invited as keynote speaker at the Universidade Federal das Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (Brazil)'s Seminar on Space & Extreme Environment Research and in 2022 she gave a plenary presentation at the 2022 Mars Society Convention.
She received attention as an independent experimental animator, as head of the media arts film program at the University of South Carolina, and as an integral member of the Southern independent film movement. [18]
Her 1983 film True Romance received a first place award in the Ann Arbor Film Festival [19] and was included in the South Carolina State Art Collection. [20] Her work as an animator is cited in the book Experimental Animation.
She worked closely with the South Carolina Arts Commission; she curated and toured with the 1982 collection Travel Films from the Southern Avant-Garde that presented experimental films from Southern states in Northeastern states. In 1985 she scripted, co-produced and hosted "A Southern Film Experience," a public television program commissioned by the South Carolina Arts Commission and South Carolina Educational Television.
She is Professor Emerita of Cinema [21] at San Francisco State University, where she has taught since 1987. She created and taught a course to study and create films made specifically for the internet, "Cinema as an Online Medium". [22] She teaches courses in digital cinema, interactive cinema, web cinema and short format screenwriting. In 2004 she was named an Apple Distinguished Educator. [23]
From 1991 to 1995 she served as chair of the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.
In 1991 she was invited by Dean August Coppola to work with a beta version of Apple's QuickTime technology. Her resulting first interactive work, Cineplay, co-produced with K.D. Davis and featured at the National Educational Film and Video Festival, began her transformation into a multimedia artist. [24]
Pleasure Island, a live web performance co-produced in 1999 with Randall Packer, was presented at USC's Interactive Frictions [25] conference on new media theory and practice. Her early web work was cited in a 1995 book, Film and Video on the Internet: The Top 500 Sites, and in the Journal of the Writers Guild of America.
She has worked with Apple, Inc. in a variety of capacities; from 2004 to 2009 she served on Apple Education's Higher Education Advisory Board and was featured in their 2007 webcast.
Millsapps has published writing in a variety of formats. Her scholarly, political and personal essays have appeared in the journal Film Literature Quarterly [26] in the book International Film, Television and Radio Journals, in the San Francisco Chronicle , in the San Francisco Examiner , on The New York Times wire service, and in the inaugural issue of Sinister Wisdom. [27]
Her short story "The Way It Was" was a 1986 award winner in the South Carolina Fiction Project. [28] She has been a contributing editor for the online rich media journal Academic Intersections. [29]
She was invited to present her ideas on writing and reading at the 2013 "Futures of the Book" event, sponsored by Transmedia SF and Swissnex.
She earned her B.A. with honors at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, her M.A. at Winthrop University, and her Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. [30]
She lives just north of San Francisco with her husband, music and media producer Phill Sawyer. [7]
San Francisco State University is a public research university in San Francisco. It was established in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School and is part of the California State University system.
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Camille Utterback is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art. One of her most well-known installations is the work Text Rain (1999).
Helen Wingard Hill was an American artist, filmmaker, writer, teacher, and social activist. When her final film, The Florestine Collection, was released in 2011, curators and critics praised her work and legacy, describing her, for example, as "one of the most well-regarded experimental animators of her generation".
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Take This Hammer is a 1964 American documentary film produced and directed by KQED (TV)'s Richard O. Moore for National Educational Television in 1963. The film first aired on February 4, 1964, in the Bay Area, at 7:30 pm on Ch.9 KQED.
The San Francisco State Gators are the athletic teams that compete at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California. The nickname applies to the college's intercollegiate NCAA Division II teams. The nickname was published in the student newspaper, "The Leaf", but was long referred to in media alternatively as the "Staters" and the "Golden Gaters". The use of Gaters eventually evolved into the Gators as known today.
The School of Cinema is an academic unit in the College of Liberal & Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, a public research university in San Francisco. It has Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Arts, and Master of Fine Arts in cinema programs. These programs have been frequently included in the annual "Top 25 American Film Schools" rankings published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez is an experimental film artist based between Miami, Florida, and La Habana, Cuba.
Madeleine Lim is a filmmaker, producer, director, cinematographer and LGBTQ activist. She is the founding Executive Director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), and an adjunct professor of film studies at the University of San Francisco. Lim is also a co-founder of SAMBAL and the US Asian Lesbian Network in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Annette Louise Barbier was an American artist and educator. She worked with video art, net art, installation art, interactive performance, and emerging and experimental technologies since the 1970s. Themes in her work address "issues of home, defined locally as domesticity and more broadly as the ways in which we relate to our environment." An early work, "Home Invasion [1995]," incorporating critical dialogue and audio, is accessible from Leonardo. "Domestic space—formerly inviolable—is increasingly disrupted by electronic communication of all sorts, including radio, TV, email and the telephone." She was Chicago-based.
Margaret Morse was an emerita professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who taught film and video. She was also a well-versed author known for her critical analysis of both United States and European media artists. She had a propensity for closed-circuit video installations. Much of her work and career revolved around subjects in experimental film, video art, interactive Media and written works looking into our interaction with modern media and digital machines.
Marjorie Conrad is a French-American filmmaker and model. She is known for being the eleventh eliminated America's Next Top Model , and for her narrative feature films Chemical Cut (2016) and Desire Path (2020).
Joanne Barker became a faculty member within the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University, in 2003. Much of her work focuses on indigenous feminism and the sovereignty and self determination of indigenous peoples. Her work takes a transnational approach, making connections between and across the borders of countries. Barker makes historical and scholarly connections between the oppression and resistance of marginalized communities. An example of this transnational approach can be seen by the work that Barker has done to show connections in the struggles of Palestinians in Israel and indigenous communities in the United States.
Deanna Morse is an independent American experimental filmmaker and media artist. Her work is included in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lynn Mahoney is an American university president, author, and social historian. Mahoney is the president of San Francisco State University (SFSU) since July 2019, and is the first woman to hold this role. Her scholarly work has focused on United States history, women's history, feminism, race studies, and ethnicity. She is the author of Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture ; a book about novelist and poet Elizabeth Stoddard.
The history of San Francisco State University began in 1857, with a teacher-training program at a high school, which led to the creation of San Francisco State Normal School. It became San Francisco State Teachers College, San Francisco State College, and California State University, San Francisco before becoming San Francisco State University as it's known today.
Raheleh "Minoosh" Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born American interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and educator. She works in many mediums, including in photography, video, installation, and performance. Her work is informed by the tension between Iran and the United States, as well as explorations of the self, of home, nature, and the environment. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Laureen Chew is an American academic and actress. She is Professor Emerita of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. She acted in two Wayne Wang films in the 1980s, both of which were shot in San Francisco.
{{cite web}}
: Missing or empty |title=
(help)