CNA Regional Council

Professor & Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Chapman University. Michael has taught at Chapman University since 2000 and served as an Associate Dean at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts since 2011. He has a B.A. in Semiotics from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.A. in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California. His areas of specialization are sound design and documentary film. He continues to work as a freelance sound designer and has done the complete post-production sound work on a number of award-winning documentaries such as, “Lost in La Mancha”, “Dirt: The Movie” and “The Bad Kids”. He enjoys cats and bicycling.

Gerda Cammaer is a Belgian-Canadian artist-scholar specialized in documentary and experimental film. She is Associate Professor, director of the Film Studies program, co-director of the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) and co-founder of the Moving-Image-Arts international short film festival, all in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the co-editor of Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (2014) and of Critical Distance in Documentary Media (2018). In 2016 she received the Outstanding Contribution to Graduate Education Award. Her areas of research are essay films, ecocinema, mobile cinema, orphan films, found-footage films and emerging technologies, particularly AR.

An American filmmaker born in El Salvador, Francisco is Artistic Director of the University of Nevada Las Vegas Department of Film, where he is also a professor. In 2017 he received a Regents’ Creative Activities Award Medal from the State of Nevada for his feature-length film Stealing Las Vegas starring Eric Roberts. He holds prestigious teaching awards from UNLV, two Charles Vanda awards for excellence in the arts, and placed 1st for two University Film and Video Association juried screening awards. Francisco served as UNLV Film Department Chair for almost two decades and raised over a million dollars for the program. Aside from filmmaking, his areas of research are: virtual reality, stereoscopy, and emerging technologies.

Brigid Maher is the Director of the Film and Media Arts Division at American University and a tenured, associate professor in the School of Communication. Maher’s creative work concentrates on national and international women’s issues with a particular focus on the Middle East and more recently women’s health.  Maher’s scholarly writing focuses on the interplay between traditional film and new media theories. Her additional award-winning film work has shown in festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Her writings have been published by Cilect, the International Digital Media Arts Conference Journal and featured in the D|N|A Anthology.

Chair, Department of Film and Television, Boston University. Director of television, film and theater. Professor Schneider has directed more than thirty movies for television and numerous television episodes as well as several independent feature films. His work has been broadcast on CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox network, the Disney Channel, Lifetime, Hallmark Channel, PBS and the Animal Planet. Theater includes: NY Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, Playwright’s Horizons, Folger Shakespeare Library. Professor Schneider received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, an MFA from Columbia University Schools of the Arts in Theater Directing and an MFA in Film Directing from the American Film Institute.