Full details for PMA 1175 - FWS: Hell is a Teenage Girl: Terror and Turmoil of Girlhood in Horror Films

From the Bronx to LA, hip-hop journeys from coast to coast and across oceans. What are the special analytical problems of hip-hop’s dissemination? How can we resolve the contradictions that arise when diasporic groups express themselves through hip-hop? This course is for students who are open to thinking critically about hip-hop’s contradictions while uplifting the culture’s beauty and imagining possibilities. We explore hip-hop’s pillars for answers (DJing, MCing, graffiti writing, breakdancing, and the pursuit of knowledge). We will listen to music, watch films, and read theoretical texts. Key authors include Jeff Chang, Paul Gilroy, and Michelle Wright; key artists: James Brown, Beat Junkies DJ crew, Triple Edge, and La Differénce. Writers will sharpen their skills to articulate strong, original arguments via five formal essays.

Full details for PMA 1183 - FWS: Hip-Hop’s Global Vibrations (NYC, LA, Southeast Asia)

In high school, I wasn’t allowed to use “I” in an essay. But now that I’m in university, “I argue” or “We observe” or something similar is in almost every article or book I’ve been assigned. When or how did “I” enter into an academic argument? When did or how do “I” enter into the university? For those of us who have entered into major spaces from backgrounds considered minor, our class seeks to critically understand the ways minoritarian people have and will make space in academia. Through exercises in “personalized” writing genre like performance reviews and conducting interviews, this course finds meanings in scholarly relations to people, texts, events, and performances through theoretical frameworks and turns these findings into cogent arguments.

Full details for PMA 1184 - FWS: Writing Our Minoritarian Selves in(to) the Academy

The Media Production Lab course is a series of self-contained lecture/workshops on various topics in the production of film and video on-set and on-location. The workshops will be hands on experience with cameras, lighting and sound equipment, exploring the technique of cinematography as well as, lighting, sound, and grip techniques for the studio and in the field. We will cover specific areas such as dollies and rigging, location sound, and production protocol. Open to all skill levels.

Full details for PMA 1410 - Media Production Laboratory

This technology lab will provide students with a foundation of the production process through experiential learning of scenographic practices. Students will learn about the technical production processes as they pertain too: scenery fabrication and installation, properties fabrication, costume fabrication, and lighting installation (primarily lighting for live performance).

Full details for PMA 1610 - Production Technology Laboratory

Students participating in a PMA creative project led by a faculty member or PMA Guest Artist can earn PMA 1611 credit.

Full details for PMA 1611 - Rehearsal and Performance

The Student Laboratory Theatre Company (SLTC) is a group of student-actors who earn credit by acting in two or three scenes directed by students taking PMA 4880.

Full details for PMA 1670 - Student Laboratory Theatre Company

The Colloquium provides opportunities for exchange, reflection, discussion of relevant concepts, and extended engagement with the media objects made in a variety of Making Media courses.

Full details for PMA 2000 - Media Studies Minor Colloquium

Contemporary Movement Practices is an intermediate-level studio immersion in contemporary concert dance genres and methodologies germane to the 21st-century field. In-depth modules will extract and explore most notably from Bartenieff Fundamentals? and Countertechnique?, as well as ripen the sensibility and capacity for current trends and approaches to dynamic floorwork, such as Flying-Low?. The objective is to cultivate and champion a dynamic anatomy and body consciousness built on learned perception, sensation, and organization. This is achieved through the experiential research and framing of Total Body Connectivity, which is based on the perennial work of Irmgard Bartenieff: Breath, Head/Tail, Core/Distal, Upper/Lower Body, Body Halves, and Diagonal.

Full details for PMA 2221 - Contemporary Dance Technique

In this course, we will explore over one hundred years of Japanese cinema—one of the most prominent and diverse global film industries—from silent comedies to J-Horror, “ramen westerns” to Studio Ghibli. You will gain a thorough grounding in film vocabulary and tools of cinematic analysis, allowing for deep investigations of gender, genre, history, and the connections between film and other media in modern and contemporary Japan. All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required. (SC)

Full details for PMA 2452 - Introduction to Japanese Film

What does it mean to call a film is Jewish? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews-actors, directors, screenwriters, composers-play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class-an average of one per week-and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Full details for PMA 2490 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

Learn what it means to run a live show. Participate as part of a team to ensure all the elements work together and on time. Learn the intricacies of collaborating with a production group to create a unified artistic vision. Program lighting, sound, or video boards, or participate as a dresser, stage crew member, or assistant stage manager.

Full details for PMA 2610 - Production Crew Laboratory

This lab will give students practical experience as an assistant stage manager in the organization and management of a theatrical or mediated production; in rehearsals, in technical rehearsals as the scenographic elements are implemented, and in performance or filming for a fully supported department production under the supervision of the staff stage manager. The course can only be applied to a fully supported department production with a full rehearsal period and performance.

Full details for PMA 2611 - Stage Management Laboratory

This course introduces students to ancient Greek drama, with a particular focus on the genre of tragedy and its relation to the cultural, political, and performance context of Athens in the 5th century BC. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in English translation and explore how they address key themes such as gender, racialization, slavery, war, mourning, trauma, empathy, and justice. Students will also study how contemporary artists, writers, and communities have adapted and restaged Greek drama, transforming and animating these ancient scripts across various media (theater, film, literature, etc.) to speak to complex and urgent social issues today (e.g., state/institutional violence; sexual violence; racism and xenophobia; queer bodies and desires; mental health; disability and caregiving).

Full details for PMA 2652 - Ancient Greek Drama

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for PMA 2681 - Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the methods employed in media arts, sound and performance. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the strategies and historical context of these disciplines. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary studio setting with a specific focus on one of these areas. Through hands-on experience, they will delve into contemporary artistic practices, honing their technical skills to develop and realize their creative projects. Potential topics covered include video and animation, digital image production, sound art, performance art, and movement

Full details for PMA 2701 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Intersections

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data. (HC)

Full details for PMA 2703 - Thinking Media

An introduction to the actor's technique and performance skills, exploring the elements necessary to begin training as an actor, i.e., observation, concentration, and imagination. Focus is on physical and vocal exercises, improvisation, and text and character. There is required play reading, play attendance, and some scene study.

Full details for PMA 2800 - Introduction to Acting

Independent study allows students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 3000 - Independent Study

Making Dance on Camera is an interdisciplinary laboratory course where students acquire and apply fundamental camera, direction, editing, and production skills through the context and collaboration of dance/movement choreography. With studies and exercises ranging from dance film and cinema to music videos, screendance, and new media and digital platforms, students will develop both hands-on and conceptual skills to produce original projects in gaining a deeper, personal understanding of the practice, power, history, theory, and potential for the dancing/moving body and its story on screen.

Full details for PMA 3243 - Making Dance on Camera

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a mafia obsession in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

Full details for PMA 3410 - Screening Cosa Nostra: The Mafia and the Movies from Scarface to The Sopranos

This course will explore approaches to the Deaf experience taken by Deaf artists from the 1900s to the present. Analysis of chosen works of Deaf art, film and theater will illuminate the expression of the Deaf narrative through symbolism, themes, and genres. We will examine the interaction of these works in multiple social, historical, cultural and political contexts and how they have contributed to the construction of Deaf culture and identity. This course will be taught in advanced ASL, with emphasis on the production and comprehension of academic ASL.

Full details for PMA 3425 - Deaf Art, Film and Theatre

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for PMA 3485 - Cinematic Cities

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship. Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation. Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek. Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions. Weekly film screening, TBA. Taught in English.

Full details for PMA 3490 - Political Theory and Cinema

A course that creates films through various cameras and tools. Using everything from film still photography to 16mm film and digital cameras, students will make diverse and experimental films. This class encourages students to step outside the traditional boundaries of cinema and create new and experimental projects.

Full details for PMA 3508 - Material Filmmaking (Experimental Film): 16mm Film, Photo, Animation

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

Full details for PMA 3550 - Global Cinema and Media

In 1968, amongst cultural and political turmoil, the American film industry adopted the ratings system, which helped usher in the kinds of cinema we know today. This course focuses on developments in U.S. cinema since then: its politics, technological and economic transformations, relationship to other media, and changing ways in which people consume it. A main focus will be the aesthetic developments of films themselves: new and changing genres, new visual styles, new ways of storytelling, and ways in which new voices and visions have emerged. Weekly screenings will include mainstream, independent, and documentary films. The course can be taken as a complement to "American Cinema" (AMST 2760) or independently.

Full details for PMA 3560 - American Cinema since 1968

An introduction to filmmaking, students will learn to create compelling characters, as well as develop strong storytelling skills through basic character and story development and breakdown, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Over the course of the semester, students will deconstruct and analyze visual culture in an effort to learn effective techniques in visual storytelling. Students will write, shoot and edit a series of dramatic narrative exercises, participating in the preproduction to post production processes. Students will collaborate and rotate through various roles. The course will culminate with the screening of the various course projects, in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for PMA 3570 - Film and Video Production I

Based on previous coursework and experience, students may be offered the opportunity to participate as an apprentice in a mentored PMA creative project. The apprentice experience and number of credits will be defined by the needs of the project, the area of study, and the mentor. Apprentice roles may include Assistant Director, Assistant Designer, Assistant Choreographer, Dramaturg, or others, as determined by the mentor. Successful completion of this course is necessary for application to the AUPR program.

Full details for PMA 3610 - Creative Apprenticeship

Introduction to draping and patterning basics followed by research, experimentation, and translation of historic silhouettes and structure. Previous basic machine sewing experience helpful, but not required.

Full details for PMA 3615 - Costume Construction Studio

The production designer is responsible for creating, controlling, and managing 'the look' of narrative films, television & contemporary and digital media from page to screen. This hands-on, project-based course explores the processes of production design, art direction, and lighting direction as related to design for these arenas. From initial Production Design sketches, Storyboards, and 'Feel-Boards' to accommodating desired cinematographic angles and looks when designing a studio set, a designer needs to shape an entire visual world while keeping in mind the story as a whole. The goal of this course is to provide an initial understanding of the Production Design process in practice through studio work and instruction.

Full details for PMA 3632 - Production Design for Film, Television and Contemporary and Digital Media Studio I

Design of costumes for theatre and film, concentrating on script and character analysis, period research, design elements, figure drawing and rendering skills, and an understanding of production style.

Full details for PMA 3660 - Costume Design Studio I

Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production. Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software. (MT)

Full details for PMA 3680 - Sound Design

What can sound tell us about culture, power, and ideology? Does it echo the information given to us by images? Does the information translate across media? Or does sonic information speak in a fundamentally different way? Does it tell us about other subjects or does it tell us information that contradicts what vision describes? What do we have to gain when we sharpen our critical tools for interpreting the work of sound or recognizing the cultural values inherent in sonic communication? Critical Listening Strategies answers that last question with a necessarily interdisciplinary approach.

Full details for PMA 3684 - Critical Listening Strategies: Lessons From Sound Art

This course explores creative collaboration, examining effective methods for leading and participating in artist-teams across various disciplines. Students will study successful models of collective art-making, drawing insights from visual arts collectives, film crews, theatre ensembles, art studios, bands, and community art projects. The course covers historical approaches, contemporary best practices, and emerging collaborative techniques, offering a cross-disciplinary view of teamwork in the arts. Through analysis of case studies and class projects, students will develop skills for fostering productive creative partnerships, managing group dynamics, and navigating the challenges of collective authorship.

Full details for PMA 3686 - Collaborative Art Practices

Practical exploration of the actor's craft through exercises in physical and psychological action, improvisation and scene study.

Full details for PMA 3800 - Acting II

In this introductory class, students will study elements of successful dramatic writing: strong structure, effective dialogue, and imaginative theatricality. Students will craft and revise short plays, in addition to drafting several short assignments and one analytical paper. Readings include full-length and 10-minute plays. Through giving and receiving constructive feedback, each writer will aim to take their work to new levels of complexity, theatricality, and meaning.

Full details for PMA 3805 - Playwriting I

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

Full details for PMA 4401 - Advanced Documentary Production

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 4461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (SC)

Full details for PMA 4513 - Labor On and Off Screen

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for PMA 4585 - Film and Video Production II

The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration(s) -- images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories. Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, artistic inventors. Work we explore this year includes the inspiration of Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, R A Walden, William Kentridge, Coco Fusco, Toni Morrison Jenny Holzer, Beatriz Cortez, Laurie Anderson, the exploration of generative AI interventions and immersive performance techniques. This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. Working collaboratively—in workshop format—students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources.

Full details for PMA 4660 - Adaptation: Visceral Text and Performance

This course will explore the cultural, political and social ramifications of stand-up comedy through the lens of twentieth and twenty-first century stand up comedians. Because of streaming services, Stand Up is more accessible than ever to a wider audience. Too, streamed video is not subject to the censorship rules of broadcast television so the wider array of subject matter and the way that subject can be presented is direct and fearless, making comics not just entertainers, but cultural influencers in a much broader way that earlier cultural critics, such as Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley could only imagine. This newfound influence makes Stand Up comedians and their comedy ripe for study, not only within a cultural context but also as a part of free-speech arguments.

Full details for PMA 4671 - Funny Business: Stand Up Comedy and Its Social, Political, and Cultural Importance

This course explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The course will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the course will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.

Full details for PMA 4681 - Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 4701 - Nightlife

This upper-level seminar considers the long evolution of queer and trans TV from its role in the origins of television as a medium through its contemporary manifestations. The premises of the course—subject to complication and contestation—include the notions that we stall as thinkers and viewers when we dwell both in the illogic of progress narratives and in the tepid debate about “good” versus “bad” televised representations of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences; that close audiovisual analysis lies at the heart of a generative study of television that must also attend closely to economic, industrial, and sociocultural schemes; and that any discourse about queerness that does not move intersectionally, with attention to race, class, ability, gender, and more, is an imprecise and inadequate one.

Full details for PMA 4712 - Queer TV

Advanced acting students will expand their skills using targeted approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

Full details for PMA 4801 - Advanced Studies in Acting Techniques

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 4841 - States of Animation

The function of the theatre critic is well understood, but the role of the dramaturg remains mysterious in the American theatre. Yet theatre critics and dramaturgs use many of the same research, analytic, and writing skills, and need the same knowledge of history, literature, and culture, to perform their duties effectively. This practicum, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will allow participants to develop the skills central to these complementary professions. The course will include units on writing effective performance reviews, working with student playwrights on new script development, preparing informational materials for directors, designers and actors, writing program essays and other informational materials for audiences, script preparation for production, and selecting/preparing translations for production. While our focus will be on the theatre, students with interest in applying these skills to film/television/media or dance contexts are welcome.

Full details for PMA 4866 - Practicum in Performance Criticism and Dramaturgy

Builds on the directing techniques learned in Fundamentals of Directing I. In this course each student directs actors from the Student Laboratory Theatre Company in a series of projects and public presentations focusing on specific directorial challenges.

Full details for PMA 4880 - Fundamentals of Directing II

First of a two-semester sequence (the second is PMA 4951) for seniors engaged in an honors project. Honor guidelines and form.

Full details for PMA 4950 - Honors Research Tutorial I

Second of a two-semester sequence (the first is PMA 4950) for students engaged in an honors project.

Full details for PMA 4951 - Honors Research Tutorial II

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for PMA 6400 - Thinking Media Studies

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 6461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (SC)

Full details for PMA 6513 - Labor On and Off Screen

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

Full details for PMA 6550 - Global Cinema and Media

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 6701 - Nightlife

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 6841 - States of Animation

Full details for PMA 6866 - Practicum in Performance Criticism and Dramaturgy

Independent study in performing and media arts allows graduate students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 7000 - Independent Study for Graduate Students in Performing and Media Arts

Provides graduate students in the field of Performing and Media Arts an opportunity to work directly with a faculty member to explore pedagogical theory and practice in undergraduate theatre classes in all areas of the curriculum.

Full details for PMA 7100 - The Pedagogy of Performing and Media Arts

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

Full details for PMA 7401 - Advanced Documentary Production