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Several former students of Terri Sarris' SAC Sketch Comedy class and other members of UM's Midnight Book Club Improv comedy group recently won the Chicago Open Regional of the College Improv Tournament. They go on to compete in the nationals in April!

(Pictured from left to right)
Alex Bernard '16, English and Political Science Major, Creative Writing Subconcentration
Joe Ambrose '17, Public Policy Major, Intergroup Relations Minor
Lauren Barrett '16, Business Administration Major, Global Media Studies Minor
Sarah Young '16, Communications Major
Anna Garcia '17, Screen Arts & Cultures Major, Performing Arts Management Minor
Graham Techler '16, Theatre Performance Major, Creative Writing Minor
THIS WEEK'S EVENTS
#UMBLACKOUT Symposium 
Thursday, February 11, 2016 
Assembly Hall, 4th Floor Rackham Graduate School
9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
In honor of Black History Month, the #UMBlackout: Mobilizing Black Communities for Radical Transformation in the Digital Age symposium invites your participation in a working session about contemporary black activist leadership for transformative change through digital forums. Through workshops, lectures, and a panel discussion, a wide variety of scholars and campus and grassroots organizers will engage in diverse reflections about the role of the internet in social change efforts through strategic mobilization. Join us in a collective discussion to advance discourse and direct action in community practice in the digital age. 
SAC Internship Panel - Sponsored by FVSA 
Friday, February 12
North Quad, Studio A
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
A panel of SAC students who have interned in LA, New York, and other locales will talk about how they found their internships, how they found housing, and what they did during their internships. If you are thinking about pursuing an internship and have questions, we would love to see you there!
MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Latino Americans: 500 Years of History - A Series of 
Films, Lectures, and Discussions Hosted by Colin Gunckel
February 16 - March 21 (complete schedule below)
Ypsilanti District Library
Free and open to the public 
Screenings of PBS Documentary Series: This landmark film series explores how Latino/as shaped America. All screenings begin at 6:30 p.m.
Foreigners in Their Own Land (Tuesday, Feb. 16)
Empire of Dreams (Monday, Feb. 22)
War and Peace (Monday, Feb. 29)
The New Latinos (Monday, March 7)
Prejudice and Pride (Monday, March 14)
Peril and Promise (Monday, March 21)
Related Discussions with Assistant Professor Colin Gunckel: 
Zoot Suit Riots (Thursday, March 3, 6:30 p.m.)
Explore the complicated racial tensions that led to the famous riots in Los Angeles in 1943.
Civil Disobedience (Wednesday, March 16, 6:30 p.m.)
Learn how art and activism influenced each other in 1970s Latino/a culture. 
20th Annual CLIFF Conference: Appetites: Discourses of Consumption 
March 10, 11, and 12
Rackham Graduate School
Times Vary; Please See Complete Conference Schedule 
Keynote speaker: Rey Chow, Professor of Literature at Duke University.  Situated at the intersection of critical theory, cultural studies, literary studies, film and media studies, and postcolonial studies, many of Chow’s recent publications directly address the connections between the culinary and the cultural, with food becoming a window into the depths of the ordinary.
Over the past twenty years, the rise of food studies has brought the culinary to the attention of academics, particularly among social scientists and in departments of cultural studies. This relatively new concern with food opens up the possibility of thinking consumption and appetites in broader terms. How do we consume bodies, images, and cultures? How can the humanities engage with food studies? Is it possible to think the consumption of food alongside other forms of consumption? This conference, aimed at graduate students in all disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, is concerned with appetite and consumption in all their varied aspects.
 
This event is sponsored by the College of LS&A, Judaic Studies, Comparative Literature, Afroamerican and African Studies, Rackham Graduate School, the International Institute, Screen Arts & Cultures, Romance Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Asian Languages and Cultures, History, English Language and Literature, and Germanic Languages and Literatures. 
SPOTLIGHT ON SAC ALUMNI 
SAC Alum Shrihari Sathe produced the new film A Woman, A Part, directed by Elisabeth Subrin, which screened recently at The International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film is about an exhausted, workaholic actress, who abruptly extricates herself from a successful but mind-numbing TV role, returning to her past life in New York to reinvent herself.
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED PHOTO
SAC Alums Andrew Laurich (left) and Sultan Sharrief (second from right) with Keegan Michael Key (right) and another friend at Sundance.
NEWS
Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection Acquires Personal Collection of Indie Filmmaker Nancy Savoca 
Philip Hallman, Kathleen Dow, Nancy Savoca, and Rich Guay examine items at the Special Collections Library.
(Photo - Mary Claire Morris)
Director, producer, and screenwriter Nancy Savoca has announced that she will donate her personal collection of papers to the U-M Library's Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers collection. Savoca will be the first female maverick to join the popular collection that comprises the papers of five other indie greats: Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, John Sayles, and most recently, Ira Deutchman. Savoca said that she and her filmmaking partner and husband Rich Guay have been teaching for as long as they have been making films, and they are looking forward to a continued partnership with U-M that will involve hosting workshops and guest lecturing. Phil Hallman, curator of U-M Library's Mavericks & Makers Collection, claims, ""Nancy and Rich are working within a model that students will be able to relate to [...] They have a natural inclination to tell stories of people we don't often get to hear from, and they're incredibly successful in creating these stories with limited budgets, working more outside of the bigger machine that is the studio system."

Above text is excerpted and modified from Sydney Hawkins's article, "U-M acquires the archive of indie filmmaker Nancy Savoca." 
Professor Markus Nornes Visits Stanford and Singapore
Professor Markus Nornes recently traveled to Stanford and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore (pictured) in order to present "afterthoughts" about his influential 1999 essay entitled, "Toward an Abusive Subtitling: Illuminating Cinema's Apparatus of Translation." Inspired by amateur anime subtitling collectives, this essay looks at the history of subtitling to critique conventional approaches and propose an "abusive" approach from a profoundly different notion of fidelity.
SAC Faculty Spotlight: Veerendra Prasad
V. Prasad received a Gilbert Whitaker grant to create an innovative new opportunity for students interested in production.  Prasad will oversee the production of an ambitious webseries about campus life.  Each season, the series will tell a different story and tackle a different issue affecting students on campuses across the country.  The first season, written by Juliana Roth and adapted from her SAC 310 screenplay, explores the fallout of a sexual assault from multiple points of view.  Students in the Spring-Summer "Independent Film and Webseries" class will shoot the ten episodes, after which the projects will be edited in David Marek's "Editing: Theory and Practice" class in the Fall.  The following Winter, Performing Arts Technology students will mix and score the episodes.  Finally, the episodes will be released as the next cycle of students begins work on Season Two.
 
Prasad is working on putting together a slate of guest speakers for the Spring-Summer and developing a unique approach to the class in order to empower students with an interest in telling stories that have an independent spirit.
SAC Graduate Student Spotlight: Doctoral Candidate Feroz Hassan

Feroz Hassan is completing a dissertation on aesthetic politics in the film theories of André Bazin and Eric Rohmer. The project places their work at the intersection of histories of film, aesthetic philosophy, and post-World War II France. It relates their engagement with the two dominant ideologies of the period (Marxism and Catholicism) to their larger theoretical propositions, and draws out their defense of a politics of "judgment", something that we recognize as a commonplace of most criticism but whose terms have been sufficiently occluded by a few decades of critique to warrant recovery.