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Radio, Television, and Digital Media Faculty
Our faculty is nationally known media makers and researchers. Our production faculty have major market experience in documentaries, electronic journalism, 3D animation, television narrative and sound arts. Our world class researchers focus on media industries, global media, communication law and ethics, corporate media creativity and alternative media worldwide.
Lisa Brooten, Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Lisa Brooten, PhD, is a Professor in the College of Arts and Media at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. Her research and publications focus on authoritarianism and media, human rights and media, media reform and democratization, social movement media, community and indigenous media, and the interplay of journalism, media reform advocacy and affect and trauma. Her regional expertise is in Southeast Asia, especially Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand, where she has travelled and conducted fieldwork for many years, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2007-2008, and an ASEAN Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2021-2022. She has consulted for Freedom House, Radio Free Asia Burmese Service and PEN American Center. She is an associate editor of Media Asia and lead editor of Myanmar Media in Transition: Legacies, Challenges and Change (ISEAS, 2019).View Full Bio
Office: COMM 1050G
lbrooten@siu.edu
David R. Burns, Associate Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
David R. Burns is a digital media artist and publishing scholar who explores the relationships between humans, technology, and nature in his creative-research. More specifically, he focuses on the tensions between technology, culture, and nature in the public and private spheres; mediating memory and postmemory; and participatory self-expression through visual music. Burns takes an interdisciplinary approach to creating digital media art by combining computer animation, 3D modeling, 3D printing, sound design, interactive media, and physical computing to push the boundaries of artistic expression. In addition to creating hybrid projects that are both artistic exhibitions and scholarly publications, Burns publishes scholarly essays where he contextualizes his artistic projects and critically analyzes contemporary issues in media arts.
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Office: COMM 2224
drburns@siu.edu
Website: www.davidrburns.com
Finley Freibert, Assistant Professor
Media Studies
Finley Freibert is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies whose research spans industry studies, media history, digital cultures, global media circulations, and LGBTQ+ cultural history. Dr. Freibert’s film and media studies work has appeared in peer-reviewed scholarly venues such as Film Criticism (University of Michigan), JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (University of Michigan), Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Monstrum (McGill University), Porn Studies (Routledge), the Journal of Homosexuality (Routledge), Spectator (University of Southern California), Synoptique (Concordia University, Montréal), and Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture (University of Texas at Austin). Dr. Freibert is coeditor (with Alicia Kozma) of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
In addition to contributing chapters to books on under-researched film directors including Jesús Franco and Roberta Findlay, Dr. Freibert has also written columns for two of the oldest American LGBT news outlets, the Advocate and the Washington Blade, and for the popular magazine The Gay & Lesbian Review. Dr. Freibert’s applied mathematics work on digital communications has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Information Theory and Advances in Mathematics of Communications. Broadly, Dr. Freibert’s research tracks how communitarian cultural productions (such as feminist and LGBT media) have been tied to commercial structures, and how such media exist in a complex relationship with economic and cultural systems of regulation.
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Office: COMM 1050H
Phone: 618-453-4531
finley.freibert@siu.edu
CV (pdf)
Dennis Galloway, Senior Lecturer
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Dennis Galloway spent over 30 years working in the television industry, primarily as a freelance director of live multi-camera productions with an emphasis on sports telecasts. His client list has included: Fox Sports Net, ESPN, BET, Atlantic 10 Television Network, Executive Communications, SportsTime Ohio, MASN, Mountaineer Sports Network, MLB Advanced Media, Pittsburgh Steelers and others.
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Office: Comm 2217
dgalloway@siu.edu
Jyotsna Kapur, Professor, Director Honors Program
Cinema
Dr. Jyotsna Kapur is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and cross-appointed with Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include: Marxist-feminist theory of media arts and culture; the cultural politics of labor, class, race, and sexuality in neoliberalism; History and theory of the documentary idea; Third Cinema; and Global children's media culture and its relation to time consciousness. She is the author of The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital (2013), Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (2005); and with Keith Wagner, Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique (2012). She is currently working on 19th century rethinking of the relationship between art, technology, and mass production relating it to the emerging thinking, including Marx's, of the concept of species-being and its relationship to the aesthetic impulse.View Full Bio
Office: COMM 1121G
jkapur@siu.edu
CV
Wago Kreider, Associate Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Wago Kreider, Associate Professor, is a media artist and experimental filmmaker. His creative work engages with contemporary strategies of artistic reenactment, the reconstruction of cinematic history, and the impact of film history on our perceptions of landscape and the environment. His films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Hong Kong Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde at the New York Film Festival, the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, the Paris Festival of Different & Experimental Cinema, and at the International Film Festival of Vienna. He has participated in artist residencies at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in New York City, Basement Films/Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque, and at Berlinale Talents as part of the Berlin International Film Festival.
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Office: COMM 1050F
wkreider@siu.edu
Website: Studio 27
Sarah Lewison, Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Professor Sarah Lewison is a media producer, artist, and writer whose work examines power, economics and political subjectivity. Her teaching and research areas include media and social change, ecological pedagogy and experimental performance. Her video work includes the documentary Fat of the Land which screened on PBS and in museums, festivals and community spaces worldwide, and is nationally noted for stimulating the do-it-yourself waste-grease bio-diesel movement. Prof. Lewison's writing about media aesthetics, social history, sustainability and culture has been published in Tema (Denmark), Journal of Northeast Studies (Hamburg, Germany), Area (Chicago), and "Failure! Experiments in Aesthetics and Social Practices" (Aesthetics and Protest Pub., LA). She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California San Diego.
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Office: Comm 1050E
slewison@siu.edu
Website: sarahlewison.com
Kevin Mercer, Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Kevin Mercer’s interdisciplinary work investigates the human as a cybernetic component within systems and networks. Handmade, pseudoscientific technology strains to establish a tenuous but critical link to the ephemeral, illustrating loss, longing, and the need for communication. Mercer integrates animation, sound, projection, physical computing, and hacked electronics within immersive spaces. Anachronistic equipment, such as black and white tube tv’s or slide projectors, deliver shaped light, digital animations, and 3D scans of found objects. Perceptions of the past and present osculate along with tangents of physical and digital realties.
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Phone: 618-453-2239Walter Metz, Professor
Cinema
Walter Metz is a Full Professor in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He earned a Ph.D. in Radio/Television/Film at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and holds an S.B. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (1989). He is the author of three books: Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (2004), Bewitched (2007), and Gilligan’s Island (2012). He is also the author of sixty refereed journal articles and book chapters about the intertextual relationships between film, television, novels, and theatre. His work roves across disciplines, grappling with the importance of audio-visual productions for understanding such disparate subjects as gender, comedy, poetry, opera, the Cold War, the Holocaust, science, and animals.
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H.D. Motyl, Associate Professor, Director School of Theater and Dance
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
H.D. Motyl is an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he teaches media production and writing for TV. His feature-length documentary about professional rodeo cowboys called Cowboy Christmas was honored as Best Feature Documentary at the Madrid International Film Festival and as Best of the Fest for Faculty Documentary at the Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts.
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Phone: 618-453-6992
hdmotyl@siu.edu
Jay Needham, Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Jay Needham is a sound artist, musician, image maker, writer-editor and cultural producer who utilizes multiple creative platforms to produce his works, many of which have a focus on sound and site-specific field research. As a hearing-divergent person, Needham makes work that often involves sensing and experiencing sound across many modalities. His sound art, works for radio, visual art, performances and installations have appeared at museums, festivals and on the airwaves, worldwide. His most recent sound installation is on permanent display in the BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry in The Republic of Panama.
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Office: COMM 1050D
jayn@siu.edu
Heather M. O'Brien-Takahashi, Assistant Professor
Cinema
Heather M. O’Brien-Takahashi is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She works in film/video, photography, and installation to build encounters with familial archives, constructs of nationhood, and the illusion of accurate memory.
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Office: COMM 1050B
heather.obrien@siu.edu
Website: heathermobrien.com
Cinzia Padovani, Associate Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
Cinzia Padovani is Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Radio Television and Digital Media, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, U.S.A. She holds an MA in Education (1989, University of L’Aquila Italy) and a PhD in Media Studies (1999, University of Colorado Boulder).
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Office: COMM 2223
padovani@siu.edu
Published Articles
John Perkins-Buzo, Associate Professor
Radio, Television, and Digital Media
My work ranges over the boundaries where Augmented and Virtual Reality, animation, cinema, and gaming narratives meet. My Fine Arts experience grounds me in aesthetics and the narrative arts, while my background in Computer Science provides a excellent technical position to approach research in the digital media arts.
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Office: Comm. 2225
Phone: 618-453-2218
rperkinsbuzo@siu.edu
Robert Spahr, Director of the School of Media Arts, Associate Professor
Robert Spahr is an Associate Professor and Director of the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is a visual artist who produces code-based automated art, live art performance, drawing, painting and sculpture all of which explores the nature of the Internet, it's strengths and failures, producing what has been called a post-Internet art that reflects the networks effect on our society and culture.
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Office: Northwest Annex 213B
rspahr@siu.edu
CV (pdf)
Hong Zhou, Associate Professor
Cinema
Hong is interested in fictional narrative filmmaking. His recent work includes "Night Train", a story about two strangers' encounters in a subway, "She Wears Yellow", a study of fictional characters, and "Sarah and Liz", a story about two sisters' adventures into the wildness. Initially influenced by surrealist painting and early experimental films, Hong's work explores the conflict and interplay between conscious and subconscious as narrative force in storytelling. Having recently worked as cinematographer on a new HD feature film, Hong is excited about the new creative possibilities of HD as a compelling narrative medium, and is planning on shooting his next project using the latest digital cinema technology.
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Office: COMM 1121H
hzhou@siu.edu