stanford university film phd

Film and Media Studies

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School of Humanities and Sciences

Develop the critical vocabulary and intellectual framework for understanding the role of cinema and related media within broad cultural and historical concepts.

What You'll Study

The Bachelor of Arts in Film & Media Studies provides an introduction to film aesthetics, national cinematic traditions, modes of production in narrative, documentary, and experimental films, the incorporation of moving image media by contemporary artists, and the proliferation of new forms of digital media. The program is designed to develop the critical vocabulary and intellectual framework for understanding the role of cinema and related media within broad cultural and historical concepts.

Degrees Offered

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Learn more about Film & Media Studies in the Stanford Bulletin

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GRADUATE PROGRAM MISSION

The mission of the graduate program in TAPS is to produce students who work in the leading edge of both scholarly and performance practice.

The Ph.D. program in TAPS emphasizes the combination of theory and practice. Graduate students complete a program with a rigorous study of critical theory, textual history, elements of production (directing, acting, choreography, writing, and design) and embodied research. We have a superb record of placement and the U.S. National Research Council ranked Stanford’s Ph.D. program in Theater & Performance Studies second in the nation.

Our generous funding package includes tuition, health insurance, travel award and a living stipend. This is a five-year fully-funded fellowship package which allows students to devote the first two years to full-time graduate study, the third year to graduate study and research, and years four and five to teaching and writing the dissertation. Following formal admission to candidacy (usually after the second year), the dissertation can be completed and approved within five years.

EXPLORE Ph.D. REQUIREMENTS

DOCTORAL PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOMES

The ph.d. is conferred upon candidates who have demonstrated substantial scholarship and the ability to conduct independent research and analysis in theater and performance studies. through completion of advanced course work and rigorous skills training, the doctoral program prepares students to make original contributions to the knowledge and production of theater and performance studies, and to interpret and present the results of such research..

Structure of the Program

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Students in the Documentary Film and Video Program become conversant with various documentary traditions, as well as with alternative media and new directions in documentary. In addition to the training in documentary production, graduates gain substantive research skills in film criticism and film analysis. The MFA degree is designed to prepare students for professional careers in film, video, and digital media, with the qualifications to teach at the university level.

In their first year, students learn the fundamentals of visual storytelling, working in a range of media, from black and white 16mm film to 4K digital video . Each film is made within a collaborative partnership, and while students serve as directors of their own projects, the partnerships encourage collegial interaction and foster community – one of the strengths of the program. A testament to the success of this approach is the number of long-standing professional relationships among our graduate alumni.

In their second year, the students produce a 15-20 minute thesis film over the course of the academic year. The films engage with pressing social issues while taking a bold, cinematic approach to documentary storytelling.

Stanford films have garnered more Student Academy Awards in the Documentary Category than any other college or university. Thesis films from the program have gone on to screen and win awards at major festivals (Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca). They have been featured in the New York Times’ OpDocs section and broadcast on PBS’ POV and Independent Lens.

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Faculty and Staff

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• MFA Documentary Film and Video - Academic Overview
• Annual Documentary Film Newsletter
• Student Awards
• Campus Visits
• Past and Present Student Work

Film/Cinema

Scott Bukatman

Shane Denson

Jan Krawitz

Jamie Meltzer

Karla Oeler

Graduate Students, Student

Delaney Chieyen Holton

J. Louise Makary

Ron Reichman

Shane Denson

Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford's Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History.

His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface  (Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture , 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016).

His most recent book,  Discorrelated Images , was published in 2020 by Duke University Press.  Discorrelated Images  explores the transitional spacetime between cinema and post-cinema. More precisely, it probes the transformational temporal and spatial articulations of contemporary moving images and our perceptual, actional, and affective interfaces with them as they migrate from conventional forms of cinema and enter the computational systems that now encompass every aspect of audiovisual mediation. While the generation, composition, distribution, and playback of images increasingly become a matter of algorithms, software, networks, and codecs, our sensory ratios (as McLuhan called them) are being reordered, our perceptual faculties are being reformed (or re-formed) in accordance with the new speeds and scales of imaging processes. In a post-cinematic media regime, that is, both the subjects and the objects of perception are radically transformed. Older relations—such as that between a human subject and a photographically fixed object—are dissolving, and new relations are being forged in the microtemporal intervals of algorithmic processing. With the new objects of computational images emerge new subjectivities, new affects, and uncertain potentials for perception and action.

Prof. Denson also serves as faculty coordinator for the Geballe Research Workshop "Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture" at the Stanford Humanities Center. From IBM punch cards to digital census forms, from ASCII art to Oculus Rift, how do we think and feel on screens and online, on disk or in the cloud, at the keyboard or off-the-grid? How do digital objects and code blur boundaries between text, image, and performativeacts? How do they challenge our understanding of the distinctions between a medium and its content? This workshop hosts conversations about material culture studies, performance theory, technology history, and aesthetics to explore a partnership between engineering and the humanities by bringing technological objects into critical humanities research and introducing new vocabularies into discussions of the design and production of our digital future.

For more information about Prof. Denson's research and teaching, see  shanedenson.com .

Research Unit Groups

• MTL (Modern Thought & Literature)

Research Interests

Academic Departments & Programs

• Department of Art & Art History
• Art & Architecture Library
• Visual Resources Center

Interdisciplinary Organizations

• Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA)
• Office of the Vice President for the Arts
• Stanford Arts Institute
• Stanford Humanities Center
• Stanford Storytelling Project
• Stanford Undergraduate Research and Independent Projects

Course Listings

• Film Production (FILMPROD)
• Film Studies (FILMSTUD)
• Film Related Courses
• Creativity Course Guide

Student Groups

• Anime in the Arts
• Golden Spikes Studios
• Restorative Film Collective
• Stanford Film Society
• Stanford Storyboard Club
• Stanford Students in Entertainment
• Stanford Visual Effects

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© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .  

Shane Denson

Director of graduate studies.

2017: Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University 2013: Mag. Phil., University of Vienna, Austria 2010: Bakk. Phil., University of Vienna, Austria

Lea Pao's research interests include German and Austrian poetry, the history of information and its theories, and graphic narrative theory. Her current book project explores the ways in which ideas about information—and the history of twentieth-century information theory—can shape our thinking about poetry’s social, cultural, and linguistic work, and vice versa. 

She is the translator of Q. G. Li’s  Tian Shu  into German, as  Buch des Himmels  (Letter P Verlag...

Committee in Charge

Emanuele Lugli

Mark Algee-Hewitt (on leave)

Scott Bukatman

Miyako Inoue

Roanne Kantor

Elizabeth Kessler

Xiaochang Li (on leave)

Hideo Mabuchi

Bernadette Meyler

Ana Raquel Minian

Ariel Stilerman

Affiliated Faculty

R. Lanier Anderson

Russell Berman

Anna Bigelow

Jennifer DeVere Brody

Gordon H. Chang

Angele Christin

Adrian Daub

Paulla Ebron

Paul Edwards

Michele Elam

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Zephyr Frank

Robert gordon.

Thomas Hansen

Robert harrison.

Gabrielle Hecht

David Hills

Hector Hoyos

Tomas Jimenez

Gavin Jones

Matthew Kohrman

Joshua Landy

Liisa Malkki

Mark McGurl

Alison McQueen

Jisha Menon

Paula M. L. Moya

Thomas Mullaney

David Palumbo-Liu

Peggy Phelan

Vaughn Rasberry

Jessica Riskin

Richard Roberts

Aileen Robinson

Jose Saldivar

Ramon Saldivar

Wendy Salkin

Londa Schiebinger

Thomas sheehan.

Matthew Smith

Frederick Turner

Richard white.

Alex Woloch

Stanford University

Placing creativity at the heart of 21st-century education.

Who Are We?

Situated in the Department of Art & Art History as part of Stanford’s program in Film and Media Studies, the Master of Fine Arts program in film production provides a historical, theoretical, and critical framework within which students master the conceptual and practical skills for producing film and video. In 2006 Stanford launched the Stanford Arts Initiative with the goal of making the arts a fundamental part of a Stanford education and building the resources and programs required to realize that vision. Thanks to the initiative, the university added new faculty positions in arts departments and programs, new graduate fellowships for PhD and MFA students, and many new arts programs and opportunities designed to ensure that every Stanford student, no matter what their major, can have a meaningful engagement with the arts.

Your degree. YOUR WAY.

The Bachelor of Arts in Film & Media Studies provides an introduction to film aesthetics, national cinematic traditions, modes of production in narrative, documentary, and experimental films, the incorporation of moving image media by contemporary artists, and the proliferation of new forms of digital media. The program is designed to develop the critical vocabulary and intellectual framework for understanding the role of cinema and related media within broad cultural and historical concepts.

arts @ home​

The Department offers a major and minor in Film & Media Studies for undergraduate students. In addition, graduate level courses in Film and Media Studies are offered in the Art History PhD program.

Contact Info

365 Lasuen St, Stanford, CA 94305 Phone: +16507364087 Email: [email protected]"

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1 - 10 of 33 results for: FILMPROD

FILMPROD 12AX: Narrative Filmmaking: From Script to Screen

Filmprod 13ax: immersive cinema, filmprod 101: screen writing i: visual writing, filmprod 101t: writing the television pilot (filmprod 301t), 2024-2025 winter.

• FILMPROD 101T | 5 units | UG Reqs: WAY-CE | Class # 3803 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | SEM | Session: 2024-2025 Winter 1 | In Person 01/06/2025 - 03/14/2025 Tue, Thu 9:30 AM - 11:20 AM at McMurtry Art Building 115 with Tobin, A. (PI) Instructors: Tobin, A. (PI)

FILMPROD 102: Topics in Screenwriting: Inside the Writers' Room

2024-2025 spring.

• FILMPROD 102 | 5 units | UG Reqs: None | Class # 6628 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | WKS | Session: 2024-2025 Spring 1 | In Person 03/31/2025 - 06/04/2025 Fri 1:30 PM - 3:20 PM at McMurtry Art Building 115 with Coker, C. (PI) Instructors: Coker, C. (PI)

FILMPROD 104: Screenwriting II: Intermediate Screenwriting (FILMPROD 304)

Filmprod 105: script analysis (filmprod 305), 2024-2025 autumn.

• FILMPROD 105 | 4 units | UG Reqs: None | Class # 29364 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit | SEM | Session: 2024-2025 Autumn 1 | In Person 09/23/2024 - 12/06/2024 Tue, Thu 10:30 AM - 11:50 AM at McMurtry Art Building Oshman with Evans, B. (PI); Tobin, A. (PI) 09/23/2024 - 12/06/2024 Mon 6:30 PM - 9:20 PM at McMurtry Art Building Oshman with Evans, B. (PI); Tobin, A. (PI) Instructors: Evans, B. (PI); Tobin, A. (PI)

FILMPROD 106: Image and Sound: Filmmaking for the Digital Age

• FILMPROD 106 | 3 units | UG Reqs: WAY-CE | Class # 29375 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | PRA | Session: 2024-2025 Autumn 1 | In Person 09/23/2024 - 12/06/2024 Tue, Thu 9:30 AM - 11:20 AM at McMurtry Art Building 018 with Kent, A. (PI); Wu, Y. (PI) Instructors: Kent, A. (PI); Wu, Y. (PI)
• FILMPROD 106 | 3 units | UG Reqs: WAY-CE | Class # 31021 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | PRA | Session: 2024-2025 Spring 1 | In Person 03/31/2025 - 06/04/2025 Tue, Thu 9:30 AM - 11:20 AM at McMurtry Art Building 018

FILMPROD 106S: Image and Sound: Filmmaking for the Digital Age

Filmprod 107: industry immersion: film and media.

• FILMPROD 107 | 1-2 units | UG Reqs: None | Class # 6706 | Section 01 | Grading: Satisfactory/No Credit | SEM | Session: 2024-2025 Spring 1 | In Person 03/31/2025 - 06/04/2025 Fri 11:30 AM - 1:20 PM with Tobin, A. (PI) Instructors: Tobin, A. (PI)

• Stanford University
• Tuesday, October 29

CBD 2024: Well-being is a Skill: Perspectives from Contemplative Neuroscience with Richard J. Davidson, PhD

• Contemplation by Design

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 12pm to 1:30pm PT

This event is open to: General Public Everyone

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Event Details:

Just like being physically in shape means regular exercise, supporting one’s emotional well-being begins with a training program—for the mind. In this talk, world-renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Richard J. Davidson discusses the scientific concept of neuroplasticity and how research in the lab confirms that well-being is a skill that can be taught. By learning and practicing the skills associated with awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—anyone can have a healthier mind, despite their external circumstances. Based on four decades of contemplative neuroscientific research, Dr. Davidson outlines a path to well-being for anyone in this highly relevant talk.

Richard J. Davidson, PhD , is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the Founder and Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc. Davidson received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Psychology in 1976. Davidson’s research is broadly focused on the neural bases of emotion and emotional style and methods to promote human flourishing including meditation and related contemplative practices. He has published over 650 articles, numerous chapters and reviews and edited 17 books. He is the author (with Sharon Begley) of The Emotional Life of Your Brain published in 2012 and co-author with Daniel Goleman of Altered Traits published in 2017. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and appointed to the Governing Board of UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in 2018. In 2014, Davidson founded the non-profit, Healthy Minds Innovations, which translates science into tools to cultivate and measure well-being.

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105-year-old Stanford graduate finally gets her diploma after 80+ year wait

Virginia hislop had waited 83 years for this day, by garvin thomas • published june 18, 2024 • updated on june 22, 2024 at 9:21 pm.

On Sunday morning, commencement exercises for Stanford University's Graduate School of Education started late. The school's undergraduate ceremony had run behind schedule, so the smaller ceremonies for graduate students ended up being pushed back half an hour.

It was a minor inconvenience for most of the 160 students getting their master's degrees and doctorates in education. For one student, though, it was downright inconsequential. Virginia Hislop had waited 83 years for this day, so what were another 30 minutes?

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"My goodness, I've waited a long time," were Hislop's exact words when she accepted her diploma.

The 105-year-old Hislop, who grew up in Southern California and now lives in Yakima, Washington, said she always wanted to go to Stanford. Her mother had attended the school in the 1920s.

"There was a desire to come to Stanford and take advantage of everything I could," Hislop said.

Hislop earned her undergraduate degree in 1940 and by the summer of 1941, Hislop had earned enough credits to qualify for a master's degree in education and only needed to write a thesis to finish meeting the degree requirements. But then, on the eve of the Second World War, her husband George, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, was called up to active duty. He was ordered to report to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

“Not my idea of a place for a honeymoon,” Hislop said. “But I had no choice in the matter.”

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Hislop was soon the mother of two small children, so returning to her studies was not a possibility.

Still, the lack of a master's in education did not stop Hislop from spending a lifetime being involved in education.

"No, it had absolutely no effect," Hislop said.

For decades, Hislop served on boards and committees overseeing every level of schooling, from kindergarten to college in Yakima.

“I gave it a great deal of thought and tried to improve the education where I lived,” Hislop said. 

One thing Hislop did not give a great deal of thought to, however, was that nearly-finished degree. It was such a non-issue her son-in-law had never heard the story until recently. He contacted Stanford to inquire about it and learned something revelatory: sometime after Hislop left Stanford, the thesis requirement for a master's had been dropped. She had earned the degree, after all.

"I was surprised and pleased," Hislop said.

So, by her grand and great-grandchildren, Hislop joined the class of 2024 on the commencement stage and received a well-deserved standing ovation. 

She viewed it as a recognition, not just for her diploma, but for all the work in education she has done in the past 80 years. 

"I feel like I've made a difference in my community," she said.

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