Can Equal TV
Representation be Demanded? * 3:00pm – 5:00pm
As
UNESCO has added cultural rights to the list of human rights,
can we in Los Angeles now interpret that advancement as the
right to minority authorship and portrayal on television?
Vince Cheung,
TV writer and producer, part of Rice & Beans comedy team
Erin Aubry
Kaplan, columnist at LA Weekly
Lisa Nakamura, U. Wisconsin faculty, author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and
Identity on the Internet
Chon Noriega,
media historian at UCLA Film & TV Dept., director of Chicano
Studies
Garth
Trinidad, DJ of KCRW's “Chocolate City,” moderator
Guest speakers on both panels
will give five minute introductory comments and then engage in
a round table discussion, eventually opening up to the
audience.
4th
Panel “Arts on TV” Speaker’s Bios:
Laurence Andries
Laurence Andries is currently
the supervising producer of “Six Feet Under” (HBO/Greenblatt-Janolllari
Productions). He is a graduate of New York University's School
of the Arts and has been writing professionally for eleven
years. In 1993, while in his second year of Walt Disney
Pictures' New Writers Fellowship Program, Laurence wrote the
Academy Award nominated courtroom drama, Kangaroo Court.
Since 1996, Laurence has
written an eclectic mix of hour drama television. His series
credits include story editor of “Dangerous Minds”
(ABC/Touchstone, 1996), executive story editor of “Prey”
(ABC/Warner Brothers, 1997), co-producer of “Millennium”
(FOX/20th-Century Fox, 1998), producer of “Hoop Life”
(Showtime/Levinson-Fontana Productions, 1999).
Tom Leeser
Tom Leeser is currently
program director of the Cal Arts Integrated Media Department
and previously was a visual effects supervisor/art director
with Academy Award winning film production studio Rhythm &
Hues, whose credits include the Empire Strikes Back,
DragonSlayer, Poltergeist, Mouse Hunt, and
Mystery Men. Tom is also an independent artist whose
work began with 16mm film, migrated to video and transformed
itself into a composite of architecture and digital image
installation. His projects have been exhibited at, among
others, Videobrasil: Festival Internacional de Arte Eletronica
and Siggraph.
Patti Podesta
Production Designer Patti
Podesta's feature credits include Memento for director
Christopher Nolan. An interview regarding her design of the
film is included in The Making of Memento, published by
Faber and Faber. Other feature films include two with
director Gregg Araki, Nowhere and Splendor, and
the upcoming Scorched. Her television work includes
the new television series called “Septuplets,” a drama for Fox
Television; “Kathy Griffin's So-Called-Reality” and the
soap/novella “Spyder Games” for MTV. She has also designed
commercials, main title sequences, music videos and an
interactive CD-Rom project.
Ms. Podesta received an MFA
from the Claremont Graduate School. Her experimental film and
video works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art,
the Rotterdam Film Festival, the American Film Institute
National Video Festival, the Pacific Film Archives and
recently at LACMA and UCLA Hammer Museum. These works include
“A Short Conversation From The Grave With Joan Burroughs” and
“A Glory.” Podesta received awards and grants for her films;
three from the National Endowment for the Arts, two from Art
Matters, Inc., the Western States Regional Media Award and the
James Phelen Award in Film.
She co-founded the video
exhibition program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and
in 1986 was director of the project “Resolution: A Critique of
Video Art” for which she edited a publication by the same
title. Podesta has been a member of the Graduate Art Faculty
at Art Center College of Design for over 10 years and teaches
the experimental art/film class.
Lynn Spigel
Lynn Spigel is a professor
currently at Northwestern University and formerly at the USC
School of Cinema/Television. She has written extensively on
film, television, and popular culture. She co-edits Camera
Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory. Her recent
works include: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family
Ideal in Postwar America (U. Chicago Press, 1992) and
Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs
(Duke Univ. Press, 2001).
5th
Panel “Equal TV Representation” Speaker’s Bios:
Vince
Cheung
Vince
Cheung is better known as the Rice half to Ben Montanio’s
Beans in the comedy writing team of Rice & Beans. Together,
they have written for television shows such as: “Married With
Children,” “The Steve Harvey Show,” “Roc,” “Empty Nest,”
“Night Court” and “Growing Pains.”
While attending UCLA, Cheung
was a struggling pre-med who opted to try his hand at stand-up
comedy instead of cramming for organic chemistry. After some
open-mike stints at the Comedy Store and Ice House and not
becoming a cardiologist, he became a page at NBC in Burbank
and got an internship in the network Story Department where he
became a script reader and immersed himself in the executive
track. He later moved to ITC Productions as a development
executive where he met Montanio who was a production
executive.
There, they forged a bond
working on low-budget features. In the wake of the 1988
writer’s strike, they were put in charge of a film where they
had to fire the original director and writer. They did a full
rewrite in a single weekend, and that’s when the writing bug
hit them, inspiring them to form their own company, Rice &
Beans Productions. Cheung and his partner are currently
consulting producers on the new WB comedy series “Greetings
From Tucson” about growing up in a bi-racial, working class
family.
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a staff
writer and "Cakewalk" columnist for the LA Weekly who
writes frequently about race, media and culture. She is a 2000
fellow in the Sundance Institute's Creative Nonfiction Writing
Program, and the winner of PEN USA West's 2001 journalism
award. She has also worked as a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times and was an original staff writer for New
Times Los Angeles. Her essays have been widely
anthologized.
Lisa Nakamura
Lisa Nakamura is Assistant
Professor of Communication Arts and Visual Culture Studies at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of
Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet
(Routledge, 2002) and the co-editor of Race in Cyberspace
(Routledge, 2000). She has published articles on cross-racial
roleplaying in Internet chatspaces, race and virtuality in the
film The Matrix, and political economies of race and
cyberspace in publications such as the Women's Review of
Books, Unspun: Key Terms for the World Wide Web,
The Cybercultures Reader, and the Visual Culture Reader
2.0.
Chon A. Noriega
Chon Noriega is Professor of
Film, Television & Digital Media at UCLA and Director of the
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. He was featured on the
MSNBC show “Edgewise” about the work of Raphael Montanez
Ortiz, a central figure in the Destructivism art movement.
Noriega guest-curated an exhibition on the artist at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. Additional stories appeared in
the New York Times and New York magazine.
Garth Trinidad
Garth Trinidad is known by
most as host mysterioso of KCRW's “Chocolate City.” For 7
years he has shared his black musical visions on air,
receiving awards and accolades from press and peers for radio
and live achievements. He is reaching a worldwide audience
with KCRW's growing internet exposure and has also programmed
music for United Airlines and Amtrak. Along with capitalizing
on his adam's apple in the world of commercial voiceover, he
has recently formed a music production company and is writing,
arranging, and remixing a small roster of artists, including
Sheree Brown. Continually looking for the perfect beat, Garth
spins records as a resident deejay at various parties around
town, including Soundlessons, a monthly event 3 years running
at downtown's Central City Café.
#
# #
For more information, bios
on invited speakers or to interview festival founder and
executive director Anne Bray please contact Lynn Hasty
at Green Galactic 323-466-5141 or
lynn@greengalactic.com.
