Who We Are
The faculty steering committee includes producers and directors who work across multiple forms of documentary as well scholars of documentary across platforms.
John D. Scott is Associate Professor of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies and the Director of the documentary studies and production degree at Ithaca College. His films have won multiple awards and glowing reviews in the US and Canada. He has directed many short films that have played internationally in over twenty countries as well as two critically acclaimed feature-length documentaries, Scouts Are Cancelled, and Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing. His films create intersections between fiction and documentary approaches to filmmaking.
Prior to joining academia, he worked as an independent producer and editor. He served as a field producer at Street Cents, a Gemini Award winning show at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He earned a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University, a BA in Honours English form Dalhousie University, and an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa.
Scott teaches documentary production, fiction production, video essay, and editing courses. Scott grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada and identifies as a Maritimer.
steering committee members
Mireille Heidbreder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences & Studies at Ithaca College. She is also an experimental filmmaker and sound designer, focusing on mixed-media film works including digital, analog, and re-purposed archival film as well as creates original sound pieces. Influenced by the philosophies of Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault, Mireille’s films frequently contemplate the audio-visual poetic relationship of spaces and the temporality of the filmic medium.
Mireille has had her films selected and screened at various festivals both nationally and internationally, including Richmond International Film Festival, Denver Underground Film Festival, ULTRACinema, and the Cardiff International Film Festival. Mireille has also designed audio-visual installations at the G Biennale and at the DEMINA Laboratorio de Artes. She was awarded the Kathryn Stephens Virginia Filmmaker Award in 2019.
Mireille additionally works on sound design/audio mixing and post-production work for other filmmakers in addition to her own work, having worked on feature length documentaries to experimental shorts. She is currently working on an experimental documentary inspired by the theories of Hito Steyerl and Walter Benjamin.
Previously, Mireille taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Richmond. She is originally from Wetzikon, Switzerland and received her MFA in Photography + Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BA in Film & Media Studies from Johns Hopkins University.
Brad Rappa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. He is an award-winning filmmaker With a background in painting, photography, documentary, and experimental media.
Shot in Iceland, Mongolia, and the United States, Rappa’s three most recent films, Losing Ground (2015), Fall (2016), and Anthropocene (2017), address climate change from global and local perspectives to investigate global consumer culture and the challenges of living in harmony with the natural environment.
His films have screened internationally at festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Tel Aviv International Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. His films were awarded Best of Fest at the Arizona International Film Festival, and Best Minnesota Made Documentary at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. His work has also received funding from the New York State Council for the Arts.
He is currently working on the final film in a three-part series entitled Mindful Hypocrisy, a playful commentary on the economic, environmental, and social costs of destructive behaviors that contribute to our rapidly diminishing biosphere .
Devan Rosen (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Professor of Emerging Media in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. His research focuses on the social uses of new media, social network analysis, and distributed socio-technical systems. He has developed social and semantic network-analytic theories and methods for the analysis of dynamic social networks in online environments. His research on decentralized self-organizing systems, Flock Theory, has been featured as the basis for several episodes of the hit CBS show Numb3rs.