Student News > A still shot from Roleplay Rangers
A film by MSUM majors in the Cinema Arts and Digital Technologies Department was one of 15 finalists for the 2012 National Film Challenge. The student group that made the film, Cinethusiasts, competed with 103 other filmmaking groups. The film is titled Roleplay Rangers and relates a story about a Junior Ranger’s wife who is forced to take up her husband’s duty to protect a local park. The National Film Challenge is a worldwide filmmaking competition from the creaators of the 48 Hour Film Project and KDHX Community Media. Participating teams have one weekend to write, shoot and edit a short film or video. Filmmakers receive a character, prop, line of dialogue, and a genre. This was the first time a team from MSUM made the finals. Graphic communications senior Juan Reyes received the Larry Gauper Advertising Creativity Scholarship in February. Reyes earned the $500 scholarship for demonstrating exceptional creative talent, passion for the advertising industry, and a commitment to a communications-based career. The competition was open to all undergraduate students in North Dakota and Moorhead. Art photography student Claire Fieldler showed two photographs in a juried exhibition, Double Exposure at the Blue Door Gallery in Yonkers, N.Y. She was one of twenty participating in the exhibition.
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Cinema Arts & Digital Technologies senior Conor Holt premiered his latest film, A Better Life, at the 2013 Fargo Film Festival. The film won Best in Show and Best Screenplay at the Spring 2013 Juried Film Exhibition at MSUM, and has now been submitted to numerous film festivals across the nation. The project, which was produced through a Filmmaker’s Grant from the Minnesota Film & Television Board, concerns a woman’s efforts to deal with her comatose husband by means of a new, radical treatment. A number of CADT students and alumni served as crew on the film. They were Conor Holt (writer/director), Ben Grell (writer), Shane Mackinnon (director of photography), Patrick McKeown (producer), Chance Cole (editor) and Mallery Mohn (production designer).
MSUM photography students Caitlin Abram, Ashley Wegh, Roni Delany, Haley Frost, Ashley Transgrud and Kristen Perala were chosen as finalists for the Photographer’s Forum Annual College Photo Competition. Their work was chosen from over 16,000 entries. Kirsten Perela’s work received an honorable mention, one of only 100 awarded. Their work will be featured in the Best of College & High School Photography annual publication.
> Perela’s “Pinhole Home”
> A still shot from A Better Life
MFA graduate students Whitney Walters, Jamee Larson, Allegra Barlow and undergraduates Katie Hansen and Maggie Olson attended the Sigma Tau Delta 2013 International Convention in March. For participating in the caucus, MSUM’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta was granted $200. The students read original essays and presented a roundtable. Seniors Simone Leclaire and Conor Holt, Cinema Arts & Digital Technologies, presented research papers at the Midwest Popular and American Culture Association Conference in Columbus, Ohio, last fall. Leclaire’s paper also won the MPCA/ACA’s Undergraduate Paper Prize.
Arts and Humanities News
Several MSUM students presented at the 5th Red River Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at NDSU last October. The students were Lance Pearson, Jacob Hedlund, John Goerke and Dylan O’Brien. Lance Pearson also presented “A Moral Accounting of Unrequited Love: Perspectives from both Hume and Kant” at the 2013 Minnesota Philosophical Society Undergraduate Conference last April at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn.
> Photo by Ashley Strazzinski
She received a Special Recognition Artist Award. The exhibition was juried by John R. Math. Her work was chosen from 672 entries from 20 countries. Brittany Cossette, Art & Design, recently exhibited in the Light, Space and Time on-line gallery show, Abstract. The exhibition was juried by John R. Math. Her work was chosen from 970 entries from 26 countries.
> Caitlin Abrams
Art and Design students Caitlin Abrams and Angela Buchanan had work accepted into the Savage Arts Council’s Seventh Juried Art Competition and Show in Savage, Minn., last spring. The Savage Juried Art Competition & Show is unique in that it engages with area businesses to exhibit the award-winning artwork in public-facing venues throughout the Savage community.
Ashley Strazzinski, Art & Design, exhibited her photography last year at the 16th International Open, an exhibition juried by Kelli Connell at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Ill. Her work was selected, along with 36 others, from over 400 entries.
Katie Hansen, Abby Swegarden, and David Vinje, Communication Arts/Literature Teacher Education, presented at the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English Spring Conference in Bloomington, Minn. Their panel presentation, “From Theory to Practice: Luring and Leading Reluctant Readers,” focused on pre-reading and duringreading lesson plans for junior high and high school students.
Courtney Johnson, Art & Design, recently exhibited in the Light, Space and Time on-line gallery show, Nature.
The Upsilon Sigma chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society at MSUM,