Shane Acker, Carla Marcantonio and Arthur Dong
Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television has appointed three new professors: Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies Carla Marcantonio, Assistant Professor of Production Shane Acker and Distinguished Professor of Film Arthur Dong.
Carla Marcantonio is a scholar of transnational/global cinema and joins SFTV’s Film and Television Studies Department as Associate Professor. Her articles and essays have appeared in collected editions as well as in journals such as Social Text, Women and Performance and Cineaste. Her book, Global Melodrama: Nation, Body, and History in Contemporary Cinema, is forthcoming this fall. The book investigates how contemporary film melodrama helps map new temporal, spatial and embodied territories in response to globalization. Professor Marcantonio’s scholarly work on Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has lead to her serving as his translator for the past decade. This work has taken diverse incarnations from interpreting during interviews at the New Yorker Festival, New York Times Talks and the AFI Fest as well as during development workshops for the adaptation of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to Broadway. She also translated the pre-production script of Broken Embraces. She was previously on the faculty at George Mason University where she was Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department. Professor Marcantonio received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2007.
Award-winning director, animator and designer Shane Acker joins the Production Department as Assistant Professor. He brings over 15 years experience working in the entertainment industry and has held academic positions at Loyola Marymount University, University of Southern California, Gnomon School for Visual Effects, American Intercontinental University and University of California, Los Angeles. As an MFA student at UCLA, Professor Acker wrote, directed and animated the 11-minute short 9, which premiered at Sundance in 2005, garnering numerous awards including a Student Academy Award, the “Best in Show” at the 2005 SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater and a student Emmy. That film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 and was subsequently made into the Focus Features 2009 feature film of the same name, produced by Tim Burton and Timor Bekmambetov. It marked Professor Acker’s directorial debut. His additional credits include Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (animator), Total Recall (previs artist) and Oz the Great and Powerful (senior previs artist). Professor Acker received his MFA in Animation from UCLA in 2005, and a Master’s degree in Architecture from UCLA in 1999.
Arthur Dong has been appointed to the newly created position of Distinguished Professor of Film. He will draw upon his expertise to help create an MFA documentary filmmaking program. Professor Dong has taught documentary film at numerous institutions locally, nationally and internationally. His films have been theatrically distributed throughout America and featured in hundreds of festivals worldwide. His awards include an Oscar nomination, a George Foster Peabody Award, three Sundance Film Festival awards, the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award, Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award and five Emmy nominations. He has been selected as a Guggenheim Film Fellow, a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellow, and honored with the Pioneer Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans, with two consecutive GLAAD Media Awards (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and the OUT 100 Award from OUT magazine, which was presented to him “for waging a one-man anti-violence project with his documentary on convicted murderers of homosexuals, Licensed to Kill.” His critically acclaimed films include Coming Out Under Fire, Forbidden City, USA; Hollywood Chinese, and most recently, The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor. Professor Dong’s book Forbidden City, USA, based on his film, won the 2015 American Book Award and the Independent Publisher’s IPPY Award. He has served on the boards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Film Independent, Outfest and the National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress. Professor Dong earned his BA in Film from San Francisco State University and holds a Directing Fellow Certificate from AFI.
