The University of New Mexico’s new Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program presents the first Film and Digital Media Summit and Mini-retreat at the Los Poblanos Cultural Center on Friday, May 1. This invitation-only event brings top New Mexico film and digital media academics, administrators and industry professionals together to brainstorm the future of UNM’s film and digital media curriculum, research, industry and community partnerships and more.
The event features a keynote address from Larry Smarr, founding director of CalIT2, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance and Harry E. Gruber professor in the Jacobs School’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He has driven major contributions to development of the national information infrastructure. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune and Business Week. He serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council.
The summit is hosted by IFDM Director Andrea Polli, who relocated to UNM from Hunter College in New York City in earlier this year, and the IFDM Faculty Council, an interdisciplinary group of faculty from UNM’s College of Fine Arts, School of Engineering, Department of Communication and Journalism, School of Architecture and Planning, and Anderson School of Management.
IFDM is a model of interdisciplinary education for the 21st century that gives students necessary critical, creative and technical skills to apply digital technologies in innovative and productive ways. The program builds on ARTS Lab (Arts Research Technology and Science Laboratory), established in 2005 under Governor Bill Richardson’s Media Industries Strategy Plan.
Polli is an associate professor in fine arts and engineering. She has developed new media programs at Robert Morris College and Columbia College in Chicago, where she was voted 2000-01 Teacher of the Year, and from 2005-08 she served as the director of the Integrated Media Arts Masters of Fine Arts Program at Hunter College, City University of New York.
She served on review and curatorial boards for SIGGRAPH, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Electronic Music Foundation and others and co-authored CUNYcolab, CUNY’s Collaborative Media Communications Lab, a project designed to bridge CUNY campuses and departments working in emerging media. She is currently co-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum, an affiliate of the College Art Association of America that promotes the advancement of research and academic scholarship at the intersections of art, science and technology.
UNM is a member of Sony Imageworks Professional Academic Excellence program, or IPAX.
Media Contacts: Sari Krosinsky, (505) 277-1593; e-mail: michal@unm.edu or Andrea Polli, apolli@unm.edu or Beverly Ortiz, bevortiz@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at April 24, 2009 12:17 PM