Faculty for Filmmaking Degree

Alexander Adrian

Biography

Alexander really likes being outdoors and especially being outdoors with a camera in hand. He’s passionate about creating and telling stories and loves to experiment with new ways of doing that.

Over the last decade Alexnder has worked through all areas of creative and production – from directing award winning films and brand campaigns to television shows and live events. Through all that time he still find nothing better than the process of taking something from an idea on paper to a tangible story or piece of content for the world to see.

Alexander is as comfortable out on a mountain ridge as he is on film set and loves developing and working on great creative.

Distinctions & Awards

Distinctions & Awards

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John Billingsley

Biography

John has diverse broadcast and media production experience, having worked in various capacities in television, radio, film and music production. Early in his career, he spent many years working in the music business in New York City while on staff at two major recording studios, Quad Studios and Looking Glass Studios. During this time, John worked on and received engineering credits on many major label releases, including albums by Phillip Glass, Nils Lofgren and Phish. Later, as a freelance audio engineer in New York, he worked for a variety of television stations and independent production companies, including MTV, VH1, The Oxygen Network and Giants Football Broadcasting.

More recently, John spent a decade working as a producer and production engineer at Vermont Public where he recorded, edited and mixed audio for broadcast and podcasts on a daily basis. In addition to producing audio content, he created videos for the station’s website. John developed and produced a music video performance series titled Live From The Fort that ran for 5 years, garnishing over 100,000 views on Youtube. He also developed, produced and occasionally hosted, a weekly series titled Safe and Sound, that focused on Vermont musicians.

Through his production company, Breadbox Productions, John have produced several documentaries. One feature documentary he co-produced, directed and wrote, Liemba, tells the story of Africa’s oldest operational ship which plies the waters of Lake Tanganyika. He has also written, performed and mixed the musical scores for several independent productions. Through the use of midi, samples and virtual instruments, he composes in styles ranging from hip-hop to classical.

John received a Bachelor of Arts from St. Lawrence University and a Master of Arts in Media Studies from The New School.

Publications & Abstracts

Liemba

Favorite Quote

“Learn as if you will live forever, live like you will die tomorrow.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

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Christopher Dreisbach

Biography

Christopher Dreisbach is an award-winning filmmaker, musician, and fine artist with over a decade of professional experience.

American Film Institute Conservatory, Master of Fine Arts (specializing in Directing)
Hampshire College, Bachelor of Arts

Distinctions & Awards

Alfred P. Sloan Science & Film Award

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Film: Housekeeping (1987), Directed by Bill Forsyth
• Music: Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (1991)
• Book: The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

Favorite Quote

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

—Robert Bresson

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Ryan Dunleavy

Biography

Ryan is a freelance artist specializing in motion graphics, animation, editing, and video production. He has 18 years of experience including 11 at a creative agency in Seattle, WA. After leaving his job there, he traveled around the world and eventually ended up in Colchester, VT, where he has 2 dogs, 3 goats, and 8 chickens.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Watch all movies by Edgar Wright
• Read the Dune Series (and new movie)
• Watch the Arcane animated series

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Favorite Quote

“Self realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates who said, ‘I drank what?'”

—Val Kilmer, Real Genius (1985)

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Ryan Liebert

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Katie Loesel

Biography

Katie Loesel grew up on Lake Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from The Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio and a Certificate in Museum Studies from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She is a snowboarder, sailor, crafter, gardener, environmentalist, cyclist, and lover of local food and drink. After living in Thailand and Boston, Katie moved to Vermont to focus on her art. She tends to make prints, drawings, installations, and sometimes books. She has participated in artist residency programs at Vermont Studio Center and Zea Mays Print Studio. Her work has been exhibited nationally, with frequent shows throughout Vermont. Katie is the recipient of a 2016 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant. Katie has taught printmaking at Burlington City Arts and Champlain College.

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Mira Niagolova

Biography

Mira Niagolova is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Since her first documentary Trafficking Cinderella (1999), she has been committed to telling stories of global concern, portrayed with sensitivity and compassion. Mira has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Sundance Documentary Grant. Her films have been screened in more than 30 countries around the world.

She has also worked nationally and internationally as a producer, programmer, distribution and festival manager with nonprofit film organizations and industry institutions, including The National Film Board of Canada.

In 2017, Mira received a Fulbright Scholarship to film and teach at the National Theater and Film School Sofia, Bulgaria, her original hometown. In 2020 in recognition for her valuable experience as a documentary filmmaker and educator, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and the Institute of International Education’s Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) added Mira to its roster of Fulbright Specialists.

Mira is passionate about teaching filmmaking and making learning a meaningful endeavor. She believes in creating an environment for her students that is inspiring and challenging, encouraging them to generate new ideas and develop their own voices that can be heard and trusted.

Distinctions & Awards

Numerous awards in filmmaking and at various festivals around the world. Most recent – Fulbright Scholarship Recipient in 2017 and 2022

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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Kerry Noonan

Biography

Kerry Noonan holds a Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Folklore & Mythology from UCLA, and her research focuses primarily on new religious movements, and women’s roles in various religions; she has published articles on Catholic Charismatic women, online religious communities, feminist witchcraft, Goddess spirituality, and New Age religious folk art, and is also a specialist in Celtic folklore, and Chinese vernacular religions. Kerry often incorporates these topics into her Core classes, and twice led a travel course about Harry Potter. She also co-teaches the FLM capstone. Kerry was a professional actor in theater, TV, & film in Los Angeles, appearing in Friday the 13th Part VI, The New Twilight Zone, China Beach, Knot’s Landing, Mr. Belvedere, Family Ties, and Taxi, plus on stage with the Los Angles Theater Center, South Coast Rep, Arizona Rep, the Grove Shakespeare Festival, and co-founded City Stage. She was part of the Irish traditional band The McGuffins. For Champlain Theatre, Kerry directed Rough Magic: A Shakespeare Compilation, Sweeney Todd, The Lion in Winter, and Blue Stockings, as well as appearing as Gertrude in Hamlet, and is now the adviser for The Champlayers. She has been a contestant on Jeopardy! and Win Ben Stein’s Money.

Distinctions & Awards

Champlain College Diversity Award: International 2013; Faculty Internationalization Initiative Grant (Champlain College) 2009

Publications & Abstracts

Publications & Abstracts

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

• American Folklore Society
• American Academy of Religion

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

One of my favorite books is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I’m also a Tolkien nerd, and a Jane Austen fanatic. I could go on and on …
A movie that I love is Fanny & Alexander, directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Favorite Quote

“The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

—Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

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Matthew Parillo

Biography

Matthew has been teaching in the Burlington area since 2010 and is currently an adjunct professor of film history and film studies at Champlain College. He has taught several courses at three different colleges including: Film History 1 & 2, Screenings, Censorship in American Cinema, The Hollywood Renaissance, Film Noir: America’s Dark Mirror, Italian Cinema, and The Cinematic Space Odyssey.

Matthew’s primary research interests are in Italian Neorealism and its influence on modern cinema, cinematic censorship and space travel cinema. As well as being an educator, Matthew is also a musician, DJ, golfer, and hockey player.

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Robin Perlah

Biography

Robin Perlah currently serves as Dean of the Core Division, Creative Studio and School of Social Innovation at Champlain College, where she is also an Associate Professor. In this role, she provides academic leadership across the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts and design disciplines.

During her time at Champlain, Perlah has held several leadership positions, including Chair of the Creative Studio, Program Director for several programs including Graphic Design (BFA), Interaction Design (BS) and Emergent Media (MFA and MS), Academic Director for the Emergent Media Center, and Assistant Dean for the Division of Communications and Creative Media. She has taught a range of courses in the areas of photography, graphic design, design history, image-making, visual design, interaction design, and media theory, serving both undergraduate and graduate students.

Perlah’s art practice is based on a persistent interest in the photographic image, both still and moving, as it is transformed by digitality. Her work deals with the ambiguity of memory, the intersection between image capture (both analog and digital) and the methods of processing and presenting images, and how generative art and data mutations can reveal layers of complexity.

Before working at Champlain College, Robin taught and ran programs in art, design and creative media in K-12 education, and developed several community art programs to support young people through art-mentoring relationships and other activities. She also served as co-director for the Technology & Design Institute at Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. Prior to her work in education, she had a long career as a professional photographer and photo editor, specializing in commercial, portrait, and event photography as well as fine-art printing.

Robin is a site evaluator for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), is part of the volunteer board for PechaKucha Night (PKN) Burlington, and currently serves as Vice Chair of the Vermont Arts Council board of trustees, which she rejoined in fall 2024. Robin earned a master of fine arts in emergent media from Champlain College, a bachelor of science in art education from the University of Vermont, and studied commercial and fine art photography at the New England School of Photography.

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John Rasmussen

Biography

John Rasmussen is an Associate Professor for Visual and Performing Arts: Film & Photographic Arts in the Division of Communication & Creative Media. He is a filmmaker working in narrative, documentary, and experimental forms. His work ranges from project documentation for organizations such as Oxfam, The United Nation to grassroots local narrative filmmaking in the U.S. Haiti, and Italy. Rasmussen’s work has been exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Haiti, France, Canada, China, and the United States.

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

University Film and Video Association

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• La Chien by Jean Renoir
• My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel

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Eric Sample

Biography

Eric Sample teaches Fundamentals of Music, Film Scoring, and Synthesis & Sound Design. He also facilitates the recording studio at Champlain College.

He is thrilled to have just completed a worldwide sabbatical, researching the music of the African diaspora and traveling to Cuba, Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, Gambia, and Senegal. He received his initial music training on the island of Jamaica, starting at the Jamaica School of Music before studying privately in Kingston with the amazing Michael Dyke (a lifelong mentor). After leaving Jamaica, Sample moved to the bright lights of New York City, and freelanced at 100+ different advertising agencies over a five-year period, getting a fascinating look at the New York media and marketing landscape.

A relentless lifelong learner, Sample has attended the following schools: the Jamaica School of Music, the Brooklyn Conservatory, the School of Visual Arts, UC Berkeley, the Berklee College of Music online, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Sample also loves architecture and design, having designed the layout of the Champlain Music Studio and his parents’ cottage. He is looking forward to his next project (with his mentor) entitled “Rock Hall Trilogy,” a cross cultural musical extravaganza featuring Love, Sex, Death and the Devil—all set in the teeming vibrant wondrous land of Jamaica.

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Paul Schnabel

Biography

Paul Schnabel is an actor/director based in Vermont. In his long career, he has performed in leading theaters throughout the US and Europe and appeared in many feature films and shorts. More recently, he has shifted focus from performance to teaching. His work with Courageous Stage in Middlebury has taken him statewide as a teaching artist in schools at all levels. He has been at Champlain College since 2019 teaching directing and acting. He particularly enjoys working in this department and considers it his mission to strengthen the directing and acting components.
He is a long-standing member of the internationally acclaimed Riot Group out of NYC and has toured extensively with them. As part of the Riot Group, he has garnered many awards over the years, including twice for Best Ensemble from the Stage in London, and 5 Fringe First Awards from the Scotsman in Edinburgh including a First of the Firsts Award. He was a finalist for an Irene Ryan Excellence in Acting Award, and awarded Best Actor in the Vermont Stage and Screen awards.
He is co-founder and past president of Off Center for the Dramatic Arts, an incubator performance venue in the New North End of Burlington.
He has been a member of SAG AFTRA for over 25 years.

Distinctions & Awards

Irene Ryan Excellence in Acting Award, finalist
Vermont Stage and Screen Awards Best Actor, winner
Scotsmen Fringe Firsts Awards x4
First of the Firsts Award
The Stage London Best Ensemble x2
Herald Angel Awards x2

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Favorite Quote

“The stars are matter. We are matter. But it doesn’t matter.”

—Don VanVliet

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Scott Tuft

Biography

Scott Tuft is an award-winning writer, director and producer who has created television programming for HBO, PBS, Cartoon Network and Disney; sold and optioned feature screenplays; written graphic novels for DC Comics and Image; and created and produced a successful independent podcast.

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Grady Welch

Biography

Grady’s interest in filmmaking began as a young child when he ran crying from the theater during Ernest Scared Stupid when the trolls come up out of the ground. He then attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and majored in Cinematography. He lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, where he worked as a cameraman on feature films, tv shows, mayonnaise commercials, and video games. Grady’s also a lifelong performer, having acted in a bunch of very serious plays and was a committed member of the LA improv and sketch community. He’s also a professional Dungeon Master, and sings in heavy metal bands. He moved to Vermont in the spring of 2022, and could not be happier to have left Mordor for The Shire.

Distinctions & Awards

“The Sweetest Show” at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson

Favorite Quote

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. —Wayne Gretzky
—Michael Scott.”

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Walter Westinghouse

Biography

Walter Westinghouse is an audio professional and educator form the North East Kingdom of Vermont. Walter has industry experience in live sound, touring, studio recording, component level audio equipment repair and recording studio installation and maintenance. He is an Avid Pro Tools Certified Operator of Post Production and Music and in 2023 became an Avid Certified Pro Tools Specialist.

Distinctions & Awards

2014 Seven Daysies Award: Best Recording Studio/ Engineer

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Van Dora Williams

Biography

Dr. Van Dora Williams brings over 30 years of industry experience as a journalist, documentary producer and researcher to the classroom and is dedicated to teaching the next generation of journalists, writers, audio and documentary producers. She currently serves as Assistant Dean of Administration for the CCM Division and holds the rank of full professor as well. She co-created the Game Sound Design program by combining sound design and audio production courses with Game Studio courses and is currently its program director. She has earned multiple Emmy and Telly awards along with having her work seen on the PBS network and through multiple film festivals that include Sundance. She created content for the print, radio, video and web platforms for several years before moving into teaching at the higher education level. Her multiplatform storytelling experience provides her the flexibility to teach the tenets of journalism and storytelling through several mediums.
She believes in bringing real world experience to students within the classroom as well as outside of the classroom. As faculty, Williams co-led two international service-learning trips to The Gambia in West Africa and to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where students worked with local journalists and filmmakers to create two short films and three short documentaries. A few of those productions earned regional Student Production Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and were broadcast statewide on Vermont Public. In coordination with the College’s Special Collections and community organizations, she worked with her colleagues to gain funding from the Council of Independent Colleges’ Humanities for the Public Good. The grants allowed her to work with students on two documentaries titled Forget Me Not Vermont (2020), Outside the Fence (2023) and a website, Green Mountain Melodies, all examining the historical impact of culture on music and urban planning.
As a researcher Dr. Williams most recent work included serving as an archival researcher for the documentary, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (2017). She served as an associate producer on Banished (2008) as well as many local documentaries and news programs as a senior producer at WHRO, the PBS station in Norfolk, Virginia where she earned multiple Emmy and Telly awards. Some of her research and producing work include Church Street: Harlem of the South (1997, WHRO), Common Ground: Legacy of Race in Religion (1999, WHRO), Noble Desire (2001, WHRO), Century: 100 Years of Life in Hampton Roads (2001, WHRO), Matters of Race (2003, ROJA Productions), Citizen King (2004, ROJA Productions). In between working on historical documentaries, Dr. Williams earned her PhD in Communication in 2017. Her dissertation focused on the impact Birth of a Nation (1915) had on three Virginia communities. She published a chapter in two international peer reviewed edited books focusing on the film’s 100th anniversary as a controversial and groundbreaking film.
She continues to conduct archival research and produce compelling documentaries on the national and regional events of the Progressive Era that continue to have an impact on American culture and society.

Publications & Abstracts

Resisting The Birth of a Nation in Virginia

Standing their ground: A southern community’s response to The Birth of a Nation

The Growing Resistance: Virginia’s Response to The Birth of a Nation, 1915 – 1925

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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