Panel Discussion with Nava Mau, Sowjanya Kudva, & Debra Tolchinsky
Thursday, April 14, 2022 | 7:00 p.m.
Panelists, Nava Mau and Sowjanya Kudva will discuss their experiences with film and television production through the lens of mental health. Moderated by Debra K. Tolchinsky, the panel will explore the stakes of mental health and well-being of production cultures within a global media industry and university production environments.
Nava Mau is an award-winning filmmaker, actress, and cultural worker. Nava wrote, produced, directed, and starred in “Waking Hour,” a short film that screened in festivals around the world. She was selected as a Production Fellow for the Netflix documentary “Disclosure,” and worked as a producer on the short film “Work,” which premiered at Sundance. She appeared next as a series regular in the HBO Max series “Generation.” For 8 years, Nava worked in the fields of healing justice and culture change with community-based service providers, student organizations, and survivors of violence.
Sowjanya Kudva, (they/them) has been working in video production for two decades across the United States. They write, produce, direct, shoot, and/or edit for corporate clients, nonprofits, independent filmmakers, and their own passion projects. Having spent a couple years mentoring youth in San Francisco, they realized a deep passion for teaching and decided to become a professor. After finishing an MFA in Film & Media Arts at Temple University, they now work as an Assistant Professor in Cinema & Television Arts within the School of Communication at Elon University. Their teaching and research interests include production studies, media literacy, cultural studies, and screen- and comics writing pedagogy. They earned their BFA in Filmmaking at UNC School of the Arts.
Debra Tolchinsky is a documentary director/producer, a multimedia artist, a curator, and an associate professor at Northwestern University. Debra was the founding director of Northwestern’s MFA in documentary media and recently served as the Department of Radio-TV-Film’s associate chair. Debra received an AB from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films (Saint Catherine’s Wedding Ring, Lucky, Dolly, Fast Talk) have been screened nationally and internationally at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, The John F. Kennedy Center, The Chicago International Film Festival, FIPADOC, The Italy Innocence Project, and the Supreme Court Institute. In 2017, Debra garnered an Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship; in 2018, she won a Kartemquin Partner Program Sage Fund grant. She has been habitually included on NewCity’s Film 50: Chicago’s Screen Gems. The New York Times recently released her short documentary, Contaminated Memories, via Op-Docs. Presently, Debra is working on a four-part episodic documentary, True Memories and Other Falsehoods, in association with Kartemquin Films.