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Leadership

Meet the Director

Dave Tolchinsky

Founder & Director of the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab

Welcome! I’m a professor, screenwriter/playwright, and filmmaker. I was the founding director of Northwestern’s MFA in Writing for the Screen+Stage program. Much of my creative work revolves around mental illness and trauma, sometimes as comedy, sometimes drama, but often seen as horror. For example, I curated a series of seven plays and films, “Sick by Seven,” about mental health in the modern world; I wrote and directed the dark comedy “An Attempt to Heal in the Contemporary World” about the rogue psychologist Wilhelm Reich; and I wrote and directed (and scored) the award-winning thriller Cassandra that deals with memory recovery methods of the ’90s. Currently, I’m producing a horror feature for Shudder/AMC Networks about extreme isolation. My dad was a Yale University professor of psychoanalysis and a movie buff (at one point, he had a collection of 7,000 DVDs), so I grew up immersed in psychology and movies. Thus, I am keenly interested in how mental illness is depicted.

Advisory Board

Affiliate Members

  • Thomas Bradshaw, chair, Department of RTVF
  • Rick Zinbarg, chair, Department of Psychology
  • AJ Christian founder of OTV | Open Television and associate professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and RTVF
  • Bruce Carruthers, professor in the Department of Sociology
  • Ariel Schwartz, associate director of research at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
  • John Csernansky, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
  • John Franklin, associate dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Student Support Chief of Addictions in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
  • Jacob Smith, professor and director of the MA in Sound Arts & Industries in the Department of RTVF and Screen Cultures doctoral program
  • E. Patrick Johnson, Dean of the School of Communication and professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and African American Studies
  • Michelle Molina, faculty in Gender Studies/Religious Studies
  • Nick Davis, associate professor of Gender Studies/English/RTVF
  • Fabiola Montiel, director of Clinical Services at Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
  • Zayd Dohrn, professor in the Department of RTVF and codirector in MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage
  • Peter Locke, assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Anthropology
  • Rebecca Seligman, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology
  • Suzanne Rosenfeld psychoanalyst, member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute
  • Debra Tolchinsky, associate professor in the Department of RTVF
  • Erin Courtney, assistant professor in the Department of RTVF
  • Eliza Bent, assistant professor of instruction in the Department of RTVF
  • Clayton Brown, professor of instruction in the Department of RTVF
  • Danielle Beverly, assistant professor in the Department of RTVF
  • Brett Neveu, senior professor of instruction in the Department of RTVF
  • Kyle Henry, associate professor in the Department of RTVF and interim head of production
  • Ozge Samanci, associate professor in the Department of RTVF
  • Stephan Moore, associate professor of instruction in the Department of RTVF
  • Ines Sommer, associate professor in the Department of RTVF and associate director of the MFA in Doc Media