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Alex Gibney, an Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy award-winning documentary film director, writer, and producer, met with students and faculty Oct. 7 to discuss the creative process behind his filmmaking and screen segments of his films.
The event is part of a yearlong series bringing together artists and scientists to talk about their techniques for combining technology with the visual arts. The speaker series is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation through the efforts of Ed Kerns, Eugene H. Clapp II ’36 Professor of Art; Chun Wai Liew, associate professor and head of computer science; and Jim Toia, director of the art department’s Community-Based Teaching program.
Other speakers will include Stacy Marsella, research associate professor of computer science at University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Oct. 27-29; sculptor Loren Madsen, Feb. 24-26; and Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, April 7-8.
The founder of Jigsaw Productions, Gibney produced and directed one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time, the 2005 Oscar-nominated film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He wrote, directed, and produced the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed by his American captors at Bagram Air Force Base in 2002. Gibney also served as a producer for Martin Scorsese’s Emmy and Grammy award-winning multi-part TV series, The Blues. His latest work is Magnolia Pictures’ Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, featuring Johnny Depp.
The speaker series has come about due to the success of the Emergent Patterns project, a multi-year collaboration between Kerns, Liew, and Elaine Reynolds, associate professor of biology and chair of neuroscience.