We are excited to welcome new faculty member Whitney Dow and teaching fellow Nyssa Chow to OHMA for the coming school year.

Whitney Dow is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator who places interviewing at the center of his work. He has been producing and directing films focused on race and identity for almost two decades as a partner in Two Tone Productions. His directorial credits include documentaries broadcast on public television: Two Towns of Jasper (P.O.V); I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Unfinished Country (Wide Angle); and When the Drum is Beating (Independent Lens). His credits as a producer include: Freedom Summer (History Channel);Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America (Independent Lens), The Undocumented (Independent Lens), Toots (Menemsha Films/Indiepix) and the Emmy nominated Among the Believers. His films have premiered at festivals ranging from Sundance to Tribeca and been broadcast on networks around the world. His work has been recognized with: the George Foster Peabody Award; Alfred I. duPont Award; Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award; and the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award as well as many film festival honors.

Dow serves as Story Director for the ongoing multi-platform public media project Veterans Coming Home. His current focus is on the Whiteness Project, a story-based interactive project that examines how Americans who identify as “white”, or “partially white” construct  their racial identity.  Since 2014, has Dow collaborated with public media’s POV to create to create a series of digital and analog projects based on 90 interviews with white Americans paired with secondary quantitative data. Dow is presently scaling the project in partnership with the Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) to include the collection of 1,000 interviews from communities across the United States.

Dow teaches interactive storytelling in the Integrated Media Arts (IMA) MFA program at CUNY Hunter College and has lectured widely. He is a graduate of Columbia University.

Whitney will be teaching a class entitled, Oral History, Documentary, and Visual Storytelling, which will introduce students to a range of aesthetic strategies, styles and techniques to help develop visual components and iterations for Oral History practice. Students apply their learning by producing short visual and documentary pieces.   

Nyssa Chow is a writer, new media storyteller and educator. She is a graduate of OHMA and of Columbia University’s MFA program, and a recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, the Women in Film and Television Fellowship, the Toms Fellowship, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation Award. She has worked as a photojournalist and in broadcast journalism. Nyssa has served as the Chief Editor of Generation Lion Magazine with circulation throughout the Caribbean, New York, and Miami. She is the 2012 recipient of the Sloan Foundation Grant to produced a feature length web-series Here Come the Humans. In 2014, she won the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Her upcoming exhibition, Still.Life, is a narrative installation built from oral histories, sound and light. For her OHMA thesis, Intersecting Histories: The Story of My Skin (still-life-project.com), she combined visual mediums of film and image, still life portraits, literary nonfiction and embodied stories as a way of telling the stories of the family of the Trinidadian women who formed her.

Nyssa will be collaborating with OHMA faculty in working with OHMA students this fall to incorporate visual thinking and new media approaches into their work and hone their storytelling and editing skills.