Donna Cameron teaches Politics of Portraiture in
Tisch Open Arts. Learn more about Donna on her website.

Brane Zivkovic (left) and Walter Murch (right).

Multiple Oscar winner Walter Murch was a guest lecturer in Brane Zivkovic’s class Music for Film and Television last month. Mr. Murch, who edited sound on American Graffiti (1973) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), won his first Oscar for Apocolypse Now (1979).  He won a double Oscar for sound and film editing for The English Patient (1996). This was his first visit to the Tisch School and NYU. His lecture about filmmaking, sound design, and music drew an audience filled with Tisch and non-Tisch students, as well as Tisch faculty.

Brane Zivkovic is a full-time faculty member in the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. His course Music for Film and Television is offered through Tisch Open Arts in the spring. In this course students learn how to compose and create music for film, television, and media, and examine the relationship between the composer, director, and music editor.

Aly, who also helped create the Tisch Dance Minor, is bringing together 100 performers for ONE at Central Park,  “a one-hour long piece of public art in Central Park about a collective manifestation of 100 dancers that are moving from one shape into the next.” The performers will dance while suspended 150 feet in the air within 6 cantilever structures erected inside Wollman Rink. Over 300 performers, designers, engineers, and production crew from across the globe are collaborating on One.

A series of shorts will also be presented in competition for seven different categories. These include French shorts and American shorts unrelated to school programs and shorts directed by students from five renowned cinema schools, including Tisch School of the Arts.

Company members Holly Goldstein and Melissa McKenna doing an exercise with neutral masks.

Sixteen students are currently in Florence studying commedia dell’arte with Jim Calder from Tisch Grad Acting. Read about their training and excursions in their tumblr.

Part of La Pietra gardens.

Here’s what Sercan had to say about Chitra and the course:

I met Chitra my first year at NYU. I knew from that moment on that I would take whatever class she was teaching. I also knew from the very first moment of Film Transformative, that we would be taking a journey. As her own film hints, it was to be “A Journey within a Journey,” one that would be fueled by powerful films that seep through our entire body and moves every one of us differently, forcing us to express our most precious, otherwise hidden and neglected emotions. Even when we were out of the class, we were part of this incessant flux, looking, noticing, doing. We were letting the inner child free.

Chitra Neogy

The ‘Movie Lover We Love’ explains that for her, the experience of watching cinema is similar to the ancient Sanskrit word “rasa,” which means to empty oneself to a work of art. She tells Indiwire, “It’s like you’re an empty vessel in front of a beautiful piece of art and you receive and it just pours into you.”

In her course Film as a Transformative Process: A Vision Beyond Technology, Chitra creates an environment where students develop a deeper language of themselves and go through a journey of self-discovery through film. This course is offered to NYU undergraduate students through the Tisch Open Arts curriculum.

Read the full Indiewire article and interview.