A Letter to Alumni and Friends from Department Chair, Adam Moore

Published June 6, 2022

Dear FEA Alumni and Friends,

The 2021-2022 Academic Year brought many changes to our department (including yours truly, the new chair), but in many ways we remained the same – a place where our students’ passion for filmmaking shines and a beacon of resilience is demonstrated by all our students, staff, and faculty. Throughout the semester the students in our department accomplished incredible achievements, such as Moises Marquez-Cayo’s selection to the 2022 Cohort of the CBS Studios Leadership Pipeline Challenge, Nick Neira’s acceptance into the Television Academy’s summer internship program, and Hope Kindred who was accepted into the UCLA Master of Fine Arts Producers Program. Our award-winning faculty continued their streak of remarkable success, including the announcement that Associate Professor Helen Hood Scheer’s feature length documentary Body Parts will premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival.

We also hosted guest artists to help guide our students through their craft and share their experiences such as Christine Swanson (For the Love of Ruth) , Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), showrunners TJ Brady and Rasheed Newson (Bel Air), Moises Zamora (Selena: The Series), and Nkechi Okoro Carroll (All-American), as well as FEA alums such as casting director Anissa Williams, Matt Misetich (Pipeline Media), Audrey Sutton (StyleLikeU and documentary freelance work), and Paula Kiley (Editorial Assistant with KCET and Research & Clearance Assistant for "BODY PARTS,").  

Our students continued to showcase their talents through culminating end of semester events such as our Screenwriters who hosted a live reading called “Screenwriters Take the Stage”, Production Management students who participated in “First Pitch”, a competition in which the best film or tv pitch won, and of course our annual end-of-year film showcases, which are now called “Full Spectrum”, in which we screened nearly four dozen films that made us laugh, scream, cry, and cheer.

I’d like to welcome our newest alumni, the Class of 2022, to the FEA alumni family. These students spent much of their time in FEA on Zoom, and only got to return to campus for their senior year. Even still, their work was impressive and inspiring, and they now join you and thousands of other FEA alums working and thriving in the film industry and beyond.

For those of you who haven’t been back to campus in a while, come on down and say hello. And if you’re interested in sharing your experience in the industry with our current students, please send me an e-mail at Adam.Moore@csulb.edu

Have a great summer, and Go Beach!

Adam Moore

Chair, Film & Electronic Arts Department