Former Illinois setter Jordyn Poulter (BS ’18, MACS) was named to the U.S. Women’s National Volleyball Team for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris this summer. The All-American setter is one of 12 selected for the roster.
Poulter, who was chosen as Best Setter at the COVID-delayed 2021 Tokyo Olympics, helped the U.S. earn its first-ever gold medal three years ago.
During her time at Illinois, Poulter was a three-time All-American, earning first-team accolades as a senior in 2018. During her senior year, the Colorado native was named the Big Ten Co-Setter of the Year, AVCA Northeast Region Player of the Year, and a finalist for the Honda Award. Poulter also led the Illini to the program’s fourth-ever NCAA National Semifinal appearance.
The Women’s Olympic indoor volleyball competition runs July 27-August 11.
Get to know some of our College of Media faculty. Angela Aguayo is an associate professor of media and cinema studies (MACS) and served as the acting director for the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies in 2023-24. She is also the director of the Illinois Community Media Project, which uses the production process, the gathering and reporting of information, to address community problems. (Learn more about the Illinois Community Media Project in this “I on the Media” video with Aguayo.)
What are some of the classes you teach? I teach various classes that have to do with audio-visual culture. Much of my specialization is in documentary. In Gender and Pop Culture, we examine how gender is articulated in movies, TV, music, and more. The class is constantly changing with the currents of what’s happening in the world. In Intro to Documentary, I encourage students to take up skills in interviewing and documentation and look into its history. The class also asks what it means to pick up a camera and engage with the world. A teacher once told me, “When documentaries are done correctly, they change who you are.” I teach New Media and Society, which addresses how new technologies are integrated into our lives—and how those technologies are partial and biased but also have capacities to engage with the world and change things. I also teach a capstone senior portfolio class for media and cinema studies majors. In that class, students look and apply for jobs, think about internships, and develop themselves professionally like finding funding for their work or applying for grad school.
What are your research interests? I’m forever fascinated with how people use the camera to access the political process, engage with the world, and articulate themselves when they don’t see something articulated in their culture. All of my work and scholarship has been about that process. It’s deeply sociological, in that I’m not preoccupied with the theater screen or traditional understandings of film culture. Rather, I’m interested in everyday people interacting with the screen and the tools of production to create new worlds around them.
What do you enjoy about working with college students? It’s this beautiful time in human development when young people are becoming unrooted from the things that created them—their families, communities, and homes—and choosing what to bring along and what to add to their lives that will be different from their family legacy. That is an interesting open space for dialogues about the world. I find those discussions with students energizing and keep me thinking freshly. I’ve been teaching for about 25 years, and I see real differences in the generations of students, which is refreshing.
What are some projects you are involved with? I’m about to start writing a new book: “Collective Matters,” which circles how people pick up the camera and engage the world to address community problems. For example, what does that look like when the only sex education is through film, or schools if they’re lucky? This has resulted in people picking up the camera, recording their lives, and sharing them with others to address absences in resources and information. My book looks at sex education, and how youth media programs have given young people access to their voice, among other topics.
I’m also writing a few grants around AI and representations of mental health in mainstream media. And I’m working with community partners to think through how we can use documentary production to give community members access to technology and authorship, whether that’s veterans finding out how to use their cell phones and record, or houseless people who don’t get access to technology. How do we help them articulate their life on their terms?
What is your favorite part of what you do? I love that every single day is different. I wake up and think about developing projects with the smartest people I know, working with the brightest students, and thinking about how we can address some of our major problems. I talk about the things that are important to me. I don’t know that many people get to do that. I have a lot of control over what I teach, how I teach it, and what I spend my time with. In a geeky way, I love intellectual puzzles—how to get a grant, make a journal article and publish it, write books, and think about structure. Everything I do is a giant intellectual puzzle.
What are some of your hobbies and interests? I see an incredible amount of live music. I spent a lot of money on concert tickets last year. I did see Taylor Swift in Los Angeles when they recorded the Eras Tour. And then I paid $20 to see the same concert in the theater. It doesn’t make much sense. I like to see concerts on campus—we just had Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, and Shawn Colvin. There’s something special about enjoying music with people in a room, whether slow, orchestral, or fast, and dancing. I appreciate that process.
I love to cook. I’ll brag about myself. I’m a great sourdough baker—country loaves, sandwich bread, pecan rolls, all kinds of things. Another MACS professor, Anita Chan, helped me learn how to make kombucha. I’m working my way through the different fermented foods. It’s good for your gut.
I love spending time with my family. I spend a lot of time on a sports field every year. My son who is 12 years old is an avid club soccer player, and now basketball. So I spend most of my weekends in small towns, big towns, all across Illinois.
What advice do you have for a student in the College of Media? University lifestyle is overwhelming. So there’s a lot to get caught up in and explore. Especially in your first couple of years, you must try as many things as possible. In that process, you’ll learn who your people are and what you’re interested in. When you have an idea, you should do what you love often and frequently, especially when it connects with your career choices.
For MACS majors, there’s so much you can do to help prepare for the moment from graduation to your career. Take every opportunity in your classroom to make something you think might showcase your skills. Take the opportunity to push yourself to learn things outside your classroom purview. So learn cameras, technical skills, etc., because you have no idea where you’ll find yourself and what skills will be useful. I did this as a young person and was surprised by what ended up being valuable to me, which were the things I didn’t give too much thought to.
If you orient your studies in an entrepreneurial way, you’ll find yourself at the end of your degree with opportunities, rather than scrambling to figure out what you need to be successful. The classroom stuff is essential and foundational, but not inclusive of everything you should know.
Students in the Fall 2023 Cinematography and Sound Design course, taught by media and cinema studies lecturer Victor Font, produced a film special of Cetacean, which aired on WILL-TV’s Prairie Fire on April 18.
The one-hour episode includes interviews with Cetacean creators, Deke Weaver and Jennifer Allen, and excerpts from last fall’s live multimedia performance, which was made possible by a collaboration with the students.
Part social practice, part visual art installation, part live event, Cetacean’s three years of research, rehearsal, and planning became a live public performance—a two- and-a-half-hour long living collage of story, dance, sound, video, lo-fi effects, and a colossal installation.
Cetacean was the sixth interdisciplinary performance from “The Unreliable Bestiary”—a lifelong project presenting a performance for every letter of the alphabet, each letter representing an endangered animal or habitat.
The second annual MACS Student Showcase on May 4, 2024, was a faculty-curated film screening featuring the work of students in media and cinema studies courses from Fall 2023 and Spring 2024—courses such as Smartphone Cinema to the Horror Film to Cinematography and Sound, and more. Faculty wanted students to have the chance to see their excellent work on a big screen and enjoy it with their friends and family!
Watch the program and see timestamps/credits below:
MACS 140: Smartphone Cinema
00:00:16 – Scene recreation from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) Jin Wang, Yue Wang, Qingyang Xia, Angela Ye, Ella Yoder, Mitchelle Zavala, Enxi Zhang, Yifan Zhao, and Yvonne Rose Smith
00:01:13 – Scene recreation from Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002) Felicity Abbott, Cameron Alagna, Jane Baer, Emily Bautista, Oscar Benavides, Britney Chen, Louis Dalpoas, Monzerrat Degollado-Hernandez, and Stephany Diaz Espino
MACS 150: Intro to Digital Media Production
00:02:48 – Choke Marilyn MacLaren
00:10:04 – Innovative Illini Anthony Mojica, Mikolaj Wierzbicki, Thomas Marousek, and Justin Martin
00:15:08 – The Dodger Nolan Duquaine, Katie Farrell, Judi Georges, Ziyu Liu, and Paul Rampersaud
00:20:42 – Snack Run Chen Chili, Akkhiel Nambbiar, and Jacob Tidrick
MACS 282: The Horror Film
00:25:50 – The Conjuring: A History of Lies Adrien Reetz
00:37:30 – Inescapable Anthony Mojica and Paige Gaines
00:44:06 – Ghostbluffers Chen Chili, Anna Dobrzyn, Kinzie Parsons, and Armando Garcia
00:54:50 – The Inter-view Izabella Kleinfeldt
00:59:13 – My Dear, Watson Kris Modi and Aidan Allenfort
[30-Minute Intermission]
MACS 485: Making Video Essays
01:40:20 – A Moving Poem Jose Figueroa Díaz
01:47:33 – Walking Jorge Mercado
MACS 590: Essential Digital Production for Graduate Students
01:49:34 – Being There: A Videographic Essay about the Camera as Presence Robbie Sieczkowski
MACS 370: Cinematography and Sound Design
01:55:18 – Excerpts from Deke Weaver and Jennifer Allen’s CETACEAN (The Whale) Filmed by MACS 370 and broadcast on Illinois Public Media’s Prairie Fire
MACS 480: Advanced Filmmaking
02:05:40 – Surprise Max Szykowny
02:44:48 – Campus Services Akkhiel Nambbiar and Hannah Herndon Original Script by Nathan Carlberg and Emily Watson
Three vertical mirrors hang on the wall in the office of Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, assistant professor of media and cinema studies, where she keeps an open area that allows her the space to move.
As a certified movement analyst and director of the movement visualization (mv) lab, she wants the space to serve as a research environment where she can use motion-capturing technology to study the manifestations of human movement in cinematic space.
Oyallon-Koloski’s idea for the book came out of her dissertation project, which tied her interest in dance and movement into her core work in film and film history.
While her dissertation focused mainly on French filmmaker Jacques Demy, using his films as case studies, her book discusses broader ideas of how people can understand the significance of dance in film.
“That’s one of the core questions [in the book]—how do filmmakers use movement to tell stories, and specifically in the musical genre,” she said.
Her book also compares French and American film production histories and considers the impact of time, money, and rehearsal space available to filmmakers.
“What I found was really interesting between French and American musicals is Hollywood had a symbiotic relationship with Broadway, and those industries or artistic sectors kind of grew together. So there was all this culture around dance and musicals, at least in the Hollywood system. But in France, those artistic sectors were really separate,” she said.
That’s one of the core questions [in the book]—how do filmmakers use movement to tell stories, and specifically in the musical genre?
Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
Oyallon-Koloski discovered an interest in dance and movement in college. While doing her dissertation research, she became a certified movement analyst at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York, an educational and research center that trains people in the language of movement.
“I was taking dance classes, but I wasn’t getting a specific degree in dance and I really wanted to be able to have credibility with the dance community,” she said.
Oyallon-Koloski spent two years studying the Laban system—a method and language describing, visualizing, interpreting, and documenting human movement invented by Rudolf von Laban in the 1920s—alongside a wide range of students with interests in dance, therapy, academic research, and more.
Using never-before-published interviews with filmmakers and choreographers, she applies the principles from the Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies to analyze the impact of figure movement in cinema.
Visualizations of movement traceforms from the mv lab.
Making video essays is one of Oyallon-Koloski’s course specialties, as well as digital media production, contemporary movies, and cinema theory.
Although she doesn’t consider videographic criticism a substitute for writing, Oyallon-Koloski does believe audiovisual context is a way to help generate interest in films, particularly those people have rarely seen.
Oyallon-Koloski, a dual American-French citizen who speaks fluent French and lived in France her senior year of high school, says her familiarity with the culture enabled her to write a book about dance in French cinema, which some might consider a fringe topic.
After completing Storytelling in Motion, Oyallon-Koloski says she realized she still has more to say on the subject of French cinema.
“I think my next project will probably be about [Jacques] Demy and his filmography. He made about 13 films, so [the book would be] less focused on dance and movement and more film history and style,” she said. “I like working with archival collections … and I like the interplay between French cinema and international cinema.”
Congratulations to all of the College of Media faculty and teaching assistants who were ranked as excellent by their students!
This list is based on Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms completed by students during the Fall 2023 semester. Only those instructors who distributed ICES forms at least once during this time period and who released their data for publication are included in the list. View the complete list.
Note: * denotes that the instructor ratings were outstanding.
Two faculty members in the College of Media were named recipients of the 2024-25 Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program to address system bias and social injustice through cross-disciplinary research. This year, the program focuses on areas that span domestic, international, and transnational spaces.
Victor Font, a lecturer in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, is collaborating on a project called “Co-creating Knowledge for Antiracist and Transnational Solidarities through Radical Practices of Care, Hope and Human Urbanisms.” His team will receive $99,560.
Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the School of Information Sciences and in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, received $100,000 for a project she leads called “Activating a Peer-to-Peer Train the Trainers Network for Digital Equity Network in East Central Illinois: Advancing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Digital Navigation Programs.” Doctoral students at the College of Media’s Institute of Communications Research, Jorge Rojas Alvarez and Jiwon Oh, will also work on this initiative.
In its third year, the Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program will distribute $1.2 million in funding to 11 research projects that support the vision of the University’s Campus-Community Compact to Accelerate Social Justice and partner with community organizations to solve and/or understand historical and current social injustices as they intersect with race.
Co-creating Knowledge for Antiracist and Transnational Solidarities through Radical Practices of Care, Hope, and Humane Urbanisms
This project aims co-create non-hierarchical learning spaces for our long-time collaborators, working across campus-community and social-spatial divides, to share social justice pedagogies and digital media methods as pathways for realizing antiracist, transnational solidarities we wish to forge across global color lines.
We build on decades-long relations of trust that faculty members at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have nurtured with academics and community groups in the U.S., South Africa, and Brazil to co-create knowledge about everyday practices of care and reciprocity that marginalized urban communities use to struggle beyond dominant divisive lines of race, gender, class, ethnicity and nationality. We refer to such ideals as humane urbanism, where life, not profit, is centered.
Using traditional action research along with emerging digital humanities methodologies, we host digital stories online through a multilingual multimedia website and host activist-in-residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus to gather direct narratives and counter-narratives of urban activists, and uncover how concealed daily practices of radical care and reciprocity in marginalized communities nurture hope and activate imagination of an alternative just future.
The goal of this project facilitating knowledge co-production among academics and community-based organizers is to learn possible paths and pragmatic strategies toward shared ideals of transnational justice.
Project leaders include Faranak Miraftab, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Ken Salo, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Helen Neville, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Magdalena Novoa, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Victor Font, College of Media; Teresa Barnes, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Atyeh Ashtari University of Memphis; Ricardo Nascimento UNILABE, Brazil; Efadul Hug, Smith College; Sarah Bassett, Arizona State University; Koni Benson, University of Western Cape; Greg Ruiters, University of Western Cape; Clarissa Freitas, Federal University of Ceara; Jose Ricardo Vargas de Faria, Federal University of Paraná; Giselle Tanaka, Federal University of Rio de Janeiroc. Community Members: Rob Robinson, Partners for Dignity and Rights; Dawn Blackman, Randolph Street Community Garden; James Kilgore, First Followers; Ann Rasmus, University of YMCA.
Activating a Peer-to-Peer Train the Trainers Network for Digital Equity Network in East Central Illinois: Advancing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Digital Navigation Programs
The “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Train-the-Trainers for Broadband Equity” Digital Navigators Program is a collaborative initiative jointly led by the Community Data Clinic at UIUC and the Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B) non-profit to address persistent issues of Broadband and Digital Inequity in East Central Illinois EC-IL, particularly affecting historically marginalized and infrastructurally underserved populations.
Leveraging existing partnerships with five community organizations – the Housing Authority of Champaign County, Cunningham Township, Project Success of Vermilion County, Champaign-Urbana Public Health District and First Followers, this project aims to establish a Digital Navigators Network and seed a new EC-IL Broadband Equity Community Hub in Champaign Park District’s multi-purpose Martens Center.
The partnership network will support the development of a local Digital Navigators Program, training 36 new community-facing Digital Navigators, equipping them with new or refurbished laptops, and leveraging resources developed in two years of prior work around broadband equity education and programming with this network.
This project’s overarching goals will enhance affordable broadband adoption, empower community members with essential digital skills, and enhance access to community technology centers. By bringing together expertise from diverse organizations, the initiative seeks to bridge the digital divide and create opportunities for improved digital connectivity and inclusivity in EC-IL. This project was developed in alignment with and prior funding from the Illinois Office of Broadband’s Digital Equity + Inclusion Programming
In addition to Chan, project leaders include Tracy Smith, Technology Services; Paul Hixson, Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband Not-for-Profit; Julian Chin, School of Information Sciences; Jessica Black, Lead for America Fellowship Program. Doctoral students at the College of Media’s Institute of Communications Research, Jorge Rojas Alvarez and Jiwon Oh, will also work on this initiative.
Clifford Christians, research professor emeritus of communications, and professor emeritus of media studies and of journalism, will receive the 2024 Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award will be presented at AEJMC’s 107th annual conference in Philadelphia this August.
“I am convinced that Dr. Christians should get credit for creating, leading, and developing the entire subfield of media and journalism ethics, not just in the United States, but in the world. At the least, without his work and his inspiration, media ethics would be entirely impoverished and thin,” said Linda Steiner (PhD ’79, ICR), editor of Journalism & Communication Monographs.
The Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award was created to recognize people who have devoted substantial parts of their careers to promoting research in mass communication, and those who have spent much of their professional lives to mentoring students in areas of research. It is named in honor of the first recipient, Eleanor Blum, a long-time communications librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Christians (PhD ’74, ICR) is a former director of the Institute of Communications Research at the College of Media and chair of the doctoral program in communications, positions he held from 1987-2001 and from 2007-2009.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals. AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.
Update June 4, 2024: Congratulations to the students who presented “Exploring Period Poverty in Sierra Leone” (pictured below) for receiving an award for Outstanding Exhibit at the Undergraduate Research Symposium from theOffice of Undergraduate Research! Learn more about their trip to Sierra Leone.
Students from the College of Media are participating in the annual University of Illinois Undergraduate Research Week, held April 21-27. The Undergraduate Research Symposium, the signature event held on April 24 at the Illini Union, features presentations, posters, and performances from students across campus.
Media student presentations include:
On Exhibit: Robots & Medical Technology “Exploring Period Poverty in Sierra Leone”
Faith Lee, junior in journalism
Piper Pascarella, sophomore in journalism
Maggie Knutte, junior in journalism
Stephanie Wayda, senior in journalism
Nour Longi, junior, journalism
Elena Cleary, junior in agricultural communications (College of ACES)
Research Mentors: Alison Davis and Charles “Stretch” Ledford, Department of Journalism
CS Student Ambassadors/Research Scholars Illinois Scholars Undergraduate Research Program Research Expo “Comparing Human Generated Text with Machine Generated Text” Garima Sharma, senior in CS + advertising
Poster Presentation: Social Science & Human Behavior “Mental Health and Wellbeing Outcomes among Gender and Sexuality Diverse Individuals Raised in Fundamentalist Religious Environments: Exploratory Analyses and Study Design” Marina Manuel, senior in media and cinema studies Research Mentor(s): Chris Fraley and Maggie Palmiero, Department of Psychology (College of LAS)
Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, assistant professor of media and cinema studies, was the research mentor for Molly Pfeifer, senior in psychology (College of LAS) and cinema studies minor, who is presenting “Embracing Ambiguity in Low Concept Film Marketing” as part of the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences poster presentations.
Steve Hall, senior lecturer in advertising, leads Boys & Girls Club students through a workshop on “Advertising for Good.” (Photos by Paige Duncan.)
The College of Media is collaborating with University of Illinois and community partners to present educational workshops to local children this spring as part of a new public engagement effort.
“One of the College of Media’s priorities is to enhance our activities in public engagement and access,” said Jason P. Chambers, associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and professor of advertising. “Faculty and staff were eager to sign up to share their expertise in fun, engaging ways with schoolchildren.”
College of Media faculty are leading four programs in April, offering new opportunities in education and technology and helping students understand different media topics.
“This first-time collaboration between the University and the Martens Center is not just exciting but a big game changer for community outreach and education, providing a unique opportunity for the University of Illinois to deliver transformative experiences to our community,” said Paige Duncan, community engagement specialist at the Center for Social and Behavioral Science.
Duncan said the College of Media was selected as the pilot module for the CSBS area of programming because their goal is to give elementary school students an introduction to a breadth of science learning opportunities, including different concepts from the social and behavioral sciences.
“We are excited about the College of Media’s programming because it gives children a window into the making of different types of media, which is likely to increase their media literacy. We hope they will become better consumers of media—for example, in terms of judging the veracity of advertisements and movies,” Duncan said.
Steve Hall, senior lecturer in advertising, held the first workshop, about “Advertising for Good.”
“It was a remarkable opportunity to help [the children] learn how they have the ability to positively impact the world with their ideas, creativity, and advertising,” Hall said. “The kids were super energetic, enthusiastic, always asking questions, and full of insights.”
Advertising for Good Steve Hall, senior lecturer in advertising Students will learn how advertising and creativity can be used for public and social good through the power of storytelling. Plus, a fun, hands-on creative challenge will allow students to generate their own ideas to create a positive impact in their own schools and communities.
Fly Like Harry Potter: How Green Screens Work Victor Font, lecturer in media and cinema studies and Susan Muirhead, advertising staff and adjunct faculty This hands-on workshop teaches students about the green screen process and how this technique is used in films. Students will be able to dress up in costume, pretend to fly on a broomstick, and then watch the editing process to remove the green background creating the final effect.
Advertising Literacy Michelle Nelson, professor and head of the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, and Marisa Peacock, lecturer in advertising This session will provide students with an understanding of the purpose and fun one can have with advertising. Through discussion, brainstorming, and hands-on activities, students will create an ad promoting healthy food products.
Introduction to Journalism and the Role of Reporters Colleen King, director of the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media and clinical assistant professor in journalism, and Faith Lee, Mark L. Brandt Public Engagement Fellow and a junior in journalism Following a presentation about what a journalist does, Genesis Bryant, a guard on the Illinois women’s basketball team will join the student group via Zoom for a Q&A. Using a guided worksheet, students will then write a story about the student athlete.
