The studio and the seminar.
A filmmaker who helps others tell their stories, because teaching was never separate from the work.
A Teaching Family
Teaching was the family business.
David grew up in an academic family. His father was a professor, and his mother taught at both the college and high-school levels. They were his first teachers, modeling that the student-teacher relationship is founded on respect and a passion for knowledge.
Teaching ran through his early life: he taught younger boys in the Colonial Williamsburg Fife & Drum Corps, and later, as an 18th-century actor-historian, brought the past to life for museum visitors and taught them its history. In graduate school at USC he served as teaching assistant for Advanced Documentary Production, for Amanda Pope and Academy Award winners Kate Amend and Mark Harris.
After USC, filmmaking took the lead, and for years he taught little beyond mentoring younger colleagues. Then the first class he ever taught, at UCLA, moved him so deeply that he felt called to become a professor, a calling that carried him to Columbia College Chicago and, today, to Syracuse.
Philosophy
My job is to look at a student's work, see what they were trying to do, and help them do it better, never to make them do it the way I would have.
David believes the best way to learn filmmaking is by making films. He meets students where they are and helps each one become a stronger version of the artist they already are, never a copy of him. He learned the most, in his own education, by having the freedom to fail, experimenting safely while his professors helped him find his own voice, and he works to build a classroom culture that rewards experimentation, peer learning, and honest, nurturing feedback. He teaches the larger principles of the craft, but always framed in the work students are actually making, never in a vacuum.
Post-production demands real technical mastery; as he puts it, technical proficiency is a prerequisite to artistic expression, much like playing an instrument. But the deeper aim is aesthetic: to feel cuts like the rhythm of music and shots like the choreography of dance, with the editor understood as a principal storyteller in the medium.
Because filmmaking is fundamentally collaborative, he believes learning it must model collaboration: working diplomatically, without ego, supported by feedback that is both honest and kind. And teaching the art and craft is only half the job. Students also need to know how to build and navigate a professional career, so he mentors one-on-one, on their projects and on the longer road ahead. He is the first to say his students teach him as much as he teaches them.
On productions like The Photographist and the Kids Matter films, he brings students onto real sets alongside faculty, modeling professional practice the way the sciences are taught, through students working in their professors' labs. The classroom becomes a set, the set becomes a classroom, and the films go out into the world to do real good. One of his graduate thesis advisees won a Student Academy Award for the film he mentored.
Academic Appointments
Leadership
Leading a department of national distinction.
As Chair of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University, David leads all of the department's programs: film, art photography, computer art and animation, and art video, each with its own faculty, students and creative identity. As chief academic and administrative officer he oversees roughly 21 full-time and 50 part-time faculty, five staff and more than 350 students across the College of Visual and Performing Arts, with study-away in Los Angeles, Prague, Florence, Berlin, Venice and Bologna. Its largest program, film, is nationally ranked by Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, MovieMaker and The Wrap.
The Department, On Film
A portrait of the department and its programs, which David edited from undergraduate and graduate thesis work.
Speaking & Workshops
Lectured, led workshops, or spoken at
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- DePaul University
- Loyola University
- Columbia College Chicago
- Le Moyne College
- Pinewood Studios
- Adler Planetarium
- University Film & Video Association
- CILECT — International Association of Film & Television Schools
- Awareness Film Festival
- Syracuse International Film Festival
- Indian Children's Film Festival
- Performing Arts Studio, Los Angeles
- Acting Studio Chicago
- Chicago Acting in Film
- The Performer's School
- Chicago Screenwriters Network
- Franklin Fine Arts Center, Chicago
- Illinois High School Theatre Festival
- Fayetteville-Manlius High School
- Alan B. Shepard High School
