The Florida State University’s School of Communication will be honored for both creative and scholarly endeavors at the Broadcast Education Association’s annual conference and festival in April, with the Media Production program winning one faculty and five student awards and a Mass Communication doctoral student winning one top-paper award and sharing another top-paper honor with a faculty member.
The awards, which will be presented at the BEA Conference and Festival of Media Awards in April in Las Vegas, were announced earlier this month.
Dr. Jeanette Castillo won a Faculty Award of Excellence for her narrative video, The Performance of Drowning. The animated short film was based on an excerpt from local writer and performance artist Terry Galloway’s memoir, Mean Little Deaf Queer.
Dr. Castillo also was the faculty advisor on the first- and second-place winners in the Scriptwriting Competition/Short Subject Narrative. Stephen Mucci took first place for Intensive Care and Daphna Shull won second place for Shabbat Shalom, Qi-Shi Da.
Christopher Michael Ruth won first place in the Promotional Video category for True Seminole Redux: This is Our Time. Mark Rodin, director of Seminole Productions, was faculty advisor.
Michelle Kinne, Tabinda Syed and Jayce Hill took second place in Short-Form Documentary for Shock Man: The Walter Hand Story. Dr. Andy Opel was faculty advisor on the video.
Greg Jack Gutierrez won an honorable mention in the Documentary category for Book Mine.
Russell Jones Levenson earned an honorable mention for his Promotional Video, Goodwill Recycling PSA. Dr. Bob Pekurny was faculty advisor.
In the Debut Paper Competition, Law & Policy Division Paper Competition, doctoral student Leah P. Hunter took top-paper honors for Feats, Foibles & Failures: Minority Ownership Policy and FCC’s Inability to Enact Long-term Change. And in the Open Paper Competition, Multicultural Studies Paper Competition, she and Dr. Jennifer Proffitt earned top-paper honors for Bounce TV: Is There Room for a Broadcast Network Targeting African Americans in the Current Political Economy?
In addition, Dr. Arthur Raney, the School of Communication’s director of doctoral studies, will lead a panel of academicians and industry leaders in a roundtable discussion titled “The Tipping Point for Enjoyable Stereoscopic 3D Entertainment: Exploring Academic-Industry Synergies.”
Dr. Raney leads FSU’s 3D Media Team, which is engaged in both 3D production and 3D scholarly research, and several other members of the team will be among the panelists: Mark Rodin, director of Seminole Productions, research associates Sophie Janicke and Andrew Ellis, and Judson French Jr., director of research and innovation initiatives at FSU’s College of Motion Picture Arts. Other panelists include scholars from Indiana University and the University of Southern California, and representatives from Sony, the 3D@Home Consortium, and The 3-D Zone.