Pitzer IMS Faculty

Alexandra Juhasz

Professor of Media Studies
Office: Fletcher 228
(909) 607-4431
ajuhasz@pitzer.edu

Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College, teaches video production and film and video theory. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and has taught courses at NYU, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College and Pitzer College on women and film, feminist film, and women's documentary. Dr. Juhasz has written multiple articles on feminist and AIDS documentary.

Dr. Juhasz produced the feature film, The Watermelon Woman, as well as nearly fifteen educational documentaries on feminist issues like teenage sexuality, AIDS, and sex education.

Her first book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1996) is about the contributions of low-end video production to political organizing and individual and community growth. Her second book is the transcribed interviews from her documentary about feminist film history, Women of Vision, with accompanying introductions (Minnesota University Press). For more info please visit Dr. Juhasz's own site.

Gina Lamb

Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Office: Avery 206
(909) 607-7952
Gina_Lamb@pitzer.edu

Gina Lamb is a Los Angeles artist-activist who has worked collaboratively with inner city youth for the past 16 years to foster their voices/vision through independent media production. Her projects have dealt with race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and immigrant issues, and have been presented nationally in museums and galleries, as well as being broadcast on television and the web. She teaches production and theory in the Media Studies Field Group at Pitzer College, and has incorporated media service projects at the college level by developing a Media Arts for Social Justice curriculum, where students use their skills and resources to develop media projects with non profit organizations; including Lideres Campesinas, Girls and Gangs, LA Freewaves, and REACH LA. Lamb is also currently the Director of Arts and Technology Programs at REACH LA, a youth arts and action center in downtown Los Angeles.

Lamb has a history of developing and implementing long-term media arts/literacy programs for youth in South, Central, and East Los Angeles. In addition she has organized city-wide youth-driven conferences where teens present workshops on their roles as makers and consumers of independent media in a mass mediated society that systematically excludes their voices. As an advocate for media literacy in education, Lamb served for four years on the National Alliance of Media Educators.

Honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and "Anonymous Was A Woman" Award, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, The City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and the California Arts Council.

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Jesse Lerner

Associate Professor of Media Studies
Office: Scott 208
(909) 607-2636
Jesse_Lerner@pitzer.edu

Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles.  His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sundance Film Festival, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilboa, and other festivals and museums internationally.

His short film Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Magnavoz (2006) and T.S.H. (2004) and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland/ Fronterilandia (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999) and The American Egypt (2001) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan.

He has received grants and fellowships including the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship (N.E.A.), the California Arts Council fellowship, the Brody Family Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fideicomiso para la cultura México-EE.UU (three time recipient) and two Fulbrights. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, his critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in Afterimage, History of Photography, Film History, The Independent, Visual Anthropology Review, The Spectator, La Pusmoderna, Wide Angle, Film History, and other media arts journals.

As a media arts curator, he has organized several exhibitions, including 51st Robert Flaherty Seminar (held at the Claremont Colleges) and The Mexperimental Cinema , a traveling retrospective of 60 years of avant-garde film and video from Mexico presented at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and elsewhere.  His books include F is for Phony (with Alex Juhasz) and The Shock of Modernity.  He has taught at the University of California San Diego, Bennington College, California Institute of the Arts, and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City.

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Ming-Yuen S. Ma

Associate Professor of Media Studies
Office: Scott 213
(909) 607-4319
Ming_Ma@pitzer.edu

Ming-Yuen S. Ma was born in Buffalo, New York, and was raised in Hong Kong. He was educated at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts. Ma has been making experimental videos for more than 15 years. His videotapes Sniff (1997), Slanted Vision (1995), Toc Storee (1992), and Aura (1991) have screened national and internationally. Ma's recent projects include the multimedia Xin Lu Project, including the four videos: [os] (2007), Movements East—West (2003), Mother/Land (2000), and Myth(s) of Creation (1997), which use personal and family history to explore the shifting identities of peoples in movement - as tourist, traveler, immigrant, refugee, exile. [os], the most recently completed video in the series, excavates the personal and the collective, the colonial and the transnational, the traumatic, the wistful, the queer, and the spectral to tell intersecting stories about our desires to return to the past. Its title represents the etymological ‘"ghost’" that haunts the creation of the word "nostalgia", which combines the Greek word nostos (return home) and New Latin algia (akin to Greek neisthai to return).

In the summer of 2006, Ma conceived and organized the ReCut Project, a weekly live art series that presented eight contemporary interpretations of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964). The ReCut Project was a part of the exhibition Draw a Line and Follow It at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Other recent hybrid media projects include THIS IS NOT A FOREIGN FILM (2002) an 18-hour installation and performance, based on Pasolini's notorious film SALO, created for Platinum Oasis, an art/performance event curated by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis, and held at the notorious Coral Sands Motel in Hollywood; Untitled: Video Self Portraits (2002), a collaboration between Ma and his students at Pitzer College with artists Amitis Motevalli and Dorit Cypis' Kulture Klub LA, created for the exhibition Democracy When!? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles. Ma has recived grants from Art Matters, Inc., Brody Arts Fund, California Digital Arts Workshop, Durfee Foundation, Long Beach Museum of Art, WESTAF/NEA, and others. Ma's critical writing and text-based art has been included in many anthologies and journals, and his work has been written about by critics and theorists including Laura Marks, (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000) Roger Garcia, (Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, 2001) Bérénice Reynaud, (Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, 1996) Holly Willis, and Gina Marchetti. Most recently, Asian American scholars Peter Feng and Xiaojing Zhou wrote about the Xin Lu Project for separate forthcoming publications. Ma’s own recent publications include Untitled (Dear Ma Liuming), in X-TRA (Winter 2006), Untitled (Dear Mr. Rocha) in Release Print (November 2005), A Conversation About Women, Gay Men, and AIDS, (with Richard Fung) in Corpus (Spring 2006). He contributed an essay, The Voice of Blindness: On the Sound Tactics of Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series, for the book More Than Meets the Eye: Critical Essays on Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series (forthcoming). He was also interviewed for the documentary Dragon Ladies and Kung-Fu Masters: Reconstructing Asian American Sexuality (sexTV), and the ACT UP Oral History Project. As an arts administrator, Ma has directed the LA Freewaves Festival of Independent Video and New Media (1998), coordinated UCLA's Electric Shadows: A Pan-Asian Film Festival (1997), and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (1995/6). As an independent curator, Ma has organized numerous media arts programs for venues including Artists' Television Access, MIX/NYC, CalArts, San Francisco Asian American Film Showcase, and Los Angeles Festival. He has served on grant panels for organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Durfee Foundation, American Film Institute, Visual Communications' Armed with ACamera Fellowship, and City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Ma has served on the boards of directors for Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. (FAR) and Highways Performance Space. He is currently a member of LACE’s Artist Advisory Board (LAB).