The Center for Documentary Research and Practice Advisory Board brings together a team of faculty and students with a shared passion for documentary. Board members are scholars and creators of the documentary form from inside and outside The Media School.
Board members use their expertise to develop projects and events, expand student engagement, and advance the center’s mission.
Tim Bell joined The Media School as a lecturer in 2017. He teaches a diverse slate of undergraduate courses in film and television studies, spanning topics including British film, adaptation, stardom, documentary, and reality television. These courses prompt students to explore and think critically about the relationship between cultural, political, and industrial forces and the popular forms of mass-mediated storytelling they shape and are informed by.
He was a Kovener Teaching Fellow for the 2022-23 academic year.
Elena Herminia Guzman is an assistant professor of African American and African diaspora studies and anthropology. She is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, educator, and scholar raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her doctorate in anthropology from Cornell University. Her ethnographic manuscript titled “Chimera Geographies: Black Feminist Borderland Performances” focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religion as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings.
In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. She co-directed a film entitled “Bronx Lives” (2014) that explores homelessness for Latinx and African Americans in New York. She is also the director of the film “Smile4Kime,” currently in production, an autoethnographic experimental portrait about friendship, mental health, and Afro-Puerto Rican spirituality. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.
Narmeen Ijaz is a doctoral student in The Media School interested in studying transnational nonfiction film cultures. Her interests overlap with the fields of documentary studies, postcolonialism, transnational feminism, and media authorship. Her background consists of both academic and professional experiences, as she previously worked as a documentary film editor for international NGOs and graduated from The Media School with a master’s in media arts and sciences. For her master’s thesis, “Decolonizing Documentary in Pakistan: Representation through Colonial, Activist and State-Sponsored Documentaries,” she studied the implications of colonial, imperial, and nationalist histories of Pakistan on the representation of local ethnic, gendered, and cultural identities.
Her current work focuses on studying how participatory and interactive approaches in documentary can shape gender representation in documentaries sponsored by transnational social-welfare organizations.
Teresa Kovacs is an assistant professor in Germanic Studies, director of the Institute of German Studies, affiliate faculty in Cultural Studies, affiliate faculty in Environmental Futures, and assistant adjunct professor in Theater, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. Her fields of interest include theater and performance, the politics of aesthetics, the comedic, environmental humanities, theater and the sciences, and transcultural theater.
Inseparable from her research is her work with graduate and undergraduate students. She is dedicated to mentoring young scholars who share an interest in theater, performance, and dance, 20th and 21st century literature, film, and media, or who want to delve into environmental humanities, theories of the Anthropocene, the politics of aesthetics, or related fields.
Novotny Lawrence is the director of the Black Film Center/Archive and an associate professor of cinema and media studies. He comes to IU from the Greenlee School of Journalism and the English Department at Iowa State University. His research focuses on African-American cinematic and mediated experiences, film and media history, and popular culture. He authored "Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s," a book discussing trends in Black representation in films of the early 1970s.
Lawrence has also been the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Popular Culture since 2019. He was previously chair of the radio, TV, and digital media department at Southern Illinois University.
Professor of anthropology Sarah Phillips has been conducting anthropological research in Ukraine since 1995. Her broad research interests have been to track the variable effects of socialist collapse on people’s lives, especially in terms of gender formations, health, social inequalities, and social justice, and changing citizen-state relations. Areas of major inquiry have included the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on health and healing strategies, the symbolic fallout of Chernobyl, the role of women in Ukraine’s civil society, the Ukrainian disability rights movement, and service provision for people who use drugs and people living with HIV in Ukraine, especially women.
She is currently exploring two major research areas. The first is disability and inclusion in the Russian Federation. This project is under the auspices of IU’s Russian Studies Workshop. The second is the resonance of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s. She is working on a book tentatively titled “Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR.”
As a senior lecturer in media arts and production, Susanne Schwibs teaches documentary, experimental, and 16mm filmmaking. In collaboration with the Jacobs School of Music, she organizes the annual Double Exposure project: Teams of student filmmakers and student composers prepare short films that are screened at the IU Cinema with live music accompaniment.
As a filmmaker, she specializes in documentaries dealing with the arts, music, history, and the American landscape. Her work can be seen on public television with several films distributed nationally through PBS, APT, or Netflix that have won Regional Emmys and CINE Golden Eagles.
