Born in the Sichuan province of China, Jerry is an Australian-Chinese filmmaker studying RTVF & Philosophy in his 4th year at Northwestern University and will begin attending USC’s Film and TV production graduate program later this year. Through the cultural lens of the global Chinese diaspora, he hopes to explore stories that center around masculinity, Christianity, classical music, and assimilation. His 2019 film “Cadenza” was selected for various Chicago film festivals, including Chi-Town Multicultural Film Festival, Blow-Up International Arthouse Filmfest, and Play-back Film Festival. Jerry is also a film composer and a street photographer enthusiast, having captured urban environments in Australia, China, and the US.

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The 2021 Northwestern Senior Directing Premiere will be virtual on Thursday, June 10, 2021!

Gregory Voelkel is a filmmaker and writer from Columbia, South Carolina. His last directorial work includes the micro-budget feature Charge (2019), which he co-directed, and the short film Playland (2020), which he wrote and directed. Gregory is deeply interested in coming-of-age narratives, ghost stories, and family. Gregory also supports documentary filmmaking, designing a filmmaking curriculum for a Chicago-area after-school program called the Young People’s Race, Power, and Technology Project (YPRPT), an initiative in collaboration with Northwestern University’s TREE Lab. He co-directed the short investigative documentary Racial Recognition (2020), and now produces high school student-made short documentaries that explore issues of technology, ethics, and race in local communities. His upcoming short, In the Woods (2021), details how a young man learns to process a breakup he can’t seem to understand.

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Alex Milne is a filmmaker working primarily in the horror and suspense genres. After working as a prose writer and playwright through high school, producing the Kitchen Sink style One Act “Static” for Chicago’s Rhino New Play Festival, Alex moved towards film, studying direction and Cinematography at Northwestern University. With his increased cinematic focus, Alex has also adopted an increasing affinity towards the surreal and supernatural drifting away from his earlier character-driven realist work. In his film and photography practices, Alex seeks to investigate the emotional realities and incoherencies of alienation, individualism, and moral crisis in the contemporary world. But mostly, Alex wants to make cool stuff with his friends.

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Marisa Ray is a writer and director raised in Skillman, New Jersey. She’s currently a senior at Northwestern University studying film and English literature. Though her main goal is to entertain, she finds that much of her work (at least, the decent stuff) has to do with outsiders and outcasts, and how they interact with an established community. In her free time, she enjoys listening to and playing music, adventuring with friends, and logging way too many hours playing video games.

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The 2021 Northwestern Senior Directing Premiere will be virtual on Thursday, June 10, 2021! 

Block 1: https://tinyurl.com/rtvfdir2021b1

Block 2: https://tinyurl.com/rtvfdir2021b2

Password: rtvfdir2021

Our Q&A session will be on Friday, June 11, 2021! Zoom Link to Come!

Julia Gorden is a senior studying Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. Everybody Knows Everybody, her senior directing project, is her first film. Outside of the program, she also directs and writes for Northwestern Sketch Television and Sherman Ave. Originally from Springfield, Illinois, she plans to stay in the Chicago area after graduating to pursue writing and directing.

Delaney McCallum grew up in Clemson, South Carolina. She attended Northwestern University, pursuing a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Radio/Television/Film with concentrations in Media & Game Design, Comedy Arts, and Advanced Directing.  In her art, she explores how memories interact with physical form. She doesn’t look back on memories with a nostalgic lens, but instead, plucks them out of their original context and reconstructs them in new ways. In the same way, she is often taking the image of her body from one point in time and suturing it together with the body of another. Through this manipulation of time and the corporeal, she investigates how physical and social contexts manipulate the female form, especially her own. What are the limits of the digital female body?  Professionally, she is passionate about increasing accessibility to the fine arts world, and including digital interactive media in art scholarship. She is interested in design roles that allow her to influence the relationship between fine arts institutions and the public.  In her free time, she is either doodling, pondering dog adoption, or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.  She has created a wide range of interactive work and animated short films, including "Mother Moon", "True Bad Stories", and "Organic Machines". She is currently finishing her undergraduate thesis film, "My Women See Ghosts" an animated documentary that explores the relationship between femininity and the supernatural. All of her work can be viewed at www.delaneymccallum.org.

Rey Tang started writing scripts and making short films in the seventh grade, after becoming inspired by Asian-Americans showcasing their videos through YouTube. In high school, Rey won a National Medal from the Scholastic Arts and Writing Competition. Rey moved to Chicago to study Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, while also pursuing a double major in Economics and a minor in Computer Science. In her sophomore year, she won the Studio 22 Bindley, one of the largest grants in the RTVF department, and wrote and directed “Noodles & Incense”. Off-set, you can find Rey playing Ultimate Frisbee and trying to find the best restaurants in Chicago.

Jesse Cortez grew up in Hawthorne, California, where his hankering for swapmeet strolls and childhood shenanigans bred his curiosity and love of storytelling. Now, he is living in Chicago to finish his final quarter at Northwestern, where he studies digital media arts and game design through the Film and Computer Science programs. He’s excited to be involved with multiple projects at the university, such as FUSE, the choice-based STEM program that he develops curriculum and creates media for. Currently and most directly, he’s involved with Rad Lads Burgers n Fries, a short about two desperate friends making their last-ditch effort at starting their own hamburger joint.

Grace Richardson is a film, dance, and computer science senior at Northwestern University and the Director of Back in a Storm. She has directed award-winning short films and studied dance under Deeply Rooted’s Nicole Springer, Mark Morris Dance Theater’s Joe Bowie, and Emmy Award winner Billy Siegenfeld. She is driven by a desire to bring dance to the masses and represent real and intersectional queer experiences on the big screen

Sumin You is a filmmaker born and raised in Korea. As an immigrant herself, Sumin addresses themes such as immigrant identity and the notion of universality in her work often in the form of Science Fiction. She has graduated from Northwestern University majoring in Film and Computer Science and she will now be based in the San Francisco Bay Area.