Featured Guests 2026
Kareema Bee: Film Screening & Discussion of THE SELF-LOVE ACT
??:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Kareema Bee is a two-time Emmy-nominated writer, producer, on-camera talent, and digital content creator who graduated from the University at Albany (B.A., English, 2009). Her newest project is THE SELF-LOVE ACT (2024-present), a docuseries that follows her personal journey to rediscover self-love through dialogue with others. The project received awards for “Best Series” or “Best Doc” at numerous festivals, including the 2024 Imagine This Women’s Festival, Paris Film Awards, Berlin Short Film Awards, and Harlem International Film Festival. She received Emmy nominations for digital work featured on the websites of Travel + Leisure and Parents magazine.
Joe Brewster: Virtual Q&A about GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT
??:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Joe Brewster, trailblazing filmmaker and psychiatrist, co-founded Rada Studios with his partner Michèle Stephenson in 2006. GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT (2023), their film about major American poet and Civil Rights activist Nikki Giovanni, won a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The film was also short-listed for a Best Documentary Oscar. Rada Studios is renowned for bringing the stories of under-served communities to mainstream attention. In November 2025, Brewster and Stephenson received Lifetime Achievement Awards at DOC NYC, the nation’s largest and most prestigious nonfiction film festival.
Phil Caruso: “On the Set of FORREST GUMP”
??:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., ?? Campus Center West Addition
Phil Caruso, known in Hollywood as “Still Phil,” is one of the most sought-after still photographers in the film and television industries. His many iconic images include the FORREST GUMP movie poster of Tom Hanks as Gump waiting on a bench for a bus. As the official still photographer on the set of FORREST GUMP, Caruso witnessed every stage of the film’s story, including Forrest’s childhood friendship with Jenny, his Vietnam War experiences, his visit to China as a ping-pong champion, the storm at sea on the shrimp boat, and his relentless cross-country run. Caruso received the Society of Camera Operators Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Sol Marina Crespo: Film Screening & Discussion of VILLA ENCANTO
??:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Sol Marina Crespo co-wrote the short film, VILLA ENCANTO (2025), about a Latina teenager uprooted from 1960s Spanish Harlem when her musician father takes a gig at a Puerto Rican summer resort in upstate NY. Crespo also portrays the owner of the club. Lin-Manuel Miranda served as the film’s executive producer. The film was inspired by a local history book about New York’s “Latin Borscht Belt,” Las Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County (2016), by Ismael Martinez, Jr. Originally from the mountains of Caimito Alto, Puerto Rico, Crespo has appeared as a character actress on many TV shows, including a recurring role as scrub nurse Kat Della Cruz on NBC’s “New Amsterdam.”
Sam Fuentes: Film Screening & Discussion of DEATH BY NUMBERS
??:15 p.m. – 1:15 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Sam Fuentes is a young poet, activist and survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. In the short film, DEATH BY NUMBERS (2024), directed by Kim Snyder and written by Fuentes, she confronts her assailant, in both legal testimony and poetry. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 2025. Fuentes last visited the Albany Film Festival with the feature-length documentary US KIDS (2020), about the personal struggles and political activism of Parkland shooting survivors, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Sundance.
Misha Gutkin: “The Anti-Rent Wars: A Multimedia Presentation”
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Misha Gutkin is the producer of CALICO REBELLION (2024), a documentary about an uprising of impoverished tenant farmers that shook the Catskills and Helderbergs in the early 19th century. A Voice of America reporter and producer, Gutkin’s credits include major international and national news events, the Olympic Games, protests and demonstrations. After immigrating to the US from Russia in the 1980s, he was instrumental in developing the first-ever independent Russian-language media in America for newly arrived Russian immigrants. He is a past recipient of Revson Foundation and New York Times Ethnic Media Fellowships.
Victoria Kupchinetsky: “The Anti-Rent Wars: A Multimedia Presentation”
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Victoria Kupchinetsky is the director of CALICO REBELLION (2024), a history of the Anti-Rent Wars, an uprising of impoverished farmers against absentee landlords that convulsed the Catskill and Helderberg regions soon after the American Revolution. Kupchinetsky is an award-winning TV journalist and producer. As the Voice of America’s on-camera correspondent in Washington and New York, she has produced stories on the US presidential elections, Guantanamo prison, climate change, race, gender and other social issues. Recently she completed a VOA documentary, THE LAKOTA DAUGHTERS, about the lives of women and girls on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Nancy Newman: “The Anti-Rent Wars: A Multimedia Presentation”
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Nancy Newman is the author of the new book, Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York (2025), about the musical culture of the tenant farmer uprising that shook our region throughout the 1840s. Together with documentary filmmaker Victoria Kupchinetsky, Newman will host a multimedia presentation about the Anti-Rent Wars featuring film clips, live musical performances, and conversation about the historical episode. Professor in the Department of Music & Theatre at UAlbany, Newman specializes in European and American musical practices since 1800, with an emphasis on the relationship between art, music and popular culture.
​Joel Perez: Film Screening & Discussion of VILLA ENCANTO
??:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Joel Perez, Broadway and off-Broadway actor, is the director and co-writer of Villa Encanto (2025), a short film about a teenager’s experiences in a Puerto Rican summer resort in the Catskills in the 1950s. Featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda as executive producer, the film celebrates a vanished world known as “Las Villas” and the “Latin Borscht Belt.” As a theater actor, Perez began his career in 2010 in the national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical “In the Heights.” In 2013, he played Mark, Pete, Roy, and Bobby Jeremy in the off-Broadway premiere of Allison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” and traveled with it to Broadway in 2015, where it won five Tony Awards.
James Poniewozik: Discussion of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
??:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for the New York Times, will revisit his acclaimed and bestselling 2019 book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. Tom Carson in Bookforum called it, "The smartest, most original, most unexpectedly definitive account of the rise of Trump and Trumpism,” and said, “It’s also the best book yet written about the bride-of-Frankenstein mating of American politics and American pop culture.” Audience of One was named a Notable or Best Book of the Year in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Slate and NPR.
Christopher Radcliff: Film Screening & Discussion of WE WERE THE SCENERY
??:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Christopher Radcliff is co-director with Stanely Nelson of HARRIET TUBMAN: VISIONS OF FREEDOM, a rich and compelling portrait of the best-known “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, marking the bicentennial of Tubman’s birth in 1822. Also with Nelson, London co-directed the PBS documentary, BECOMING FREDERICK DOUGLASS (2022). As producer, London shared an Emmy for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary for MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL (2019). Her newest film as director is THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MISS SCOTT (2025), the true story of African American jazz virtuoso Hazel Scott, an early civil rights activist and pioneering TV host who faced persecution during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
John Sayles: Discussion about his film career and new novel Crucible
??:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Campus Center Ballroom
John Sayles, legendary independent filmmaker, is the author of Crucible (2026), a novel about Henry Ford, the ruthless, power-mad “tech bro” or his generation. Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Sam Sacks called it, “A sprawling, mural-like novel that engages with the process, the spirit and especially the conflicts of breakneck industrial progress ... [with] a dynamic vision of American history.” Sayles, who grew up in Schenectady, is a celebrated pioneer of indie cinema. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay— for PASSION FISH (1992) and LONE STAR (1996); and once for the National Book Award—for the novel, Union Dues (1977).
Mayukh Sen: Discussion of Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
??:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Mayukh Sen is the author of Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (2025), a biography of the leading actress of the American film industry’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ‘40s. Born in Bombay, Oberon hid her Indian origins throughout her career to escape racism in the film industry. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, Love, Queenie was named a Best Book of 2025 by Publishers Weekly and Booklist. An award-winning food writer, Sen won the James Beard Award for Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (2021), an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Kim Snyder: Film Screening & Discussion of DEATH BY NUMBERS
??:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Kim Snyder, Oscar-nominated and Peabody-winning filmmaker, is the director of the surprise hit documentary, THE LIBRARIANS (2025), and the Oscar-nominated documentary short, DEATH BY NUMBERS (2024), starring Parkland shooting survivor, Sam Fuentes. Snyder and Fuentes last visited the Albany Film Festival in 2022 with US KIDS (2020) about the personal struggles and ongoing activism of Parkland survivors. THE LIBRARIANS presents the stories of courageous school librarians who suddenly find themselves on the front lines of defending democracy and intellectual freedom. Unusual for a documentary, the film was given a 2025 theatrical release and continues to be screened at hundreds of community gatherings throughout the nation.
Michèle Stephenson: Virtual Q&A about GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT
??:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Michèle Stephenson, trailblazing Haitian-Panamian filmmaker, co-founded Rada Studios with her partner Joe Brewster in 2006. GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT (2023), their film about major American poet and Civil Rights activist Nikki Giovanni, won a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The film was also short-listed for a Best Documentary Oscar. Rada Studios is renowned for bringing the stories of under-served communities to mainstream attention. In November 2025, Stephenson and Brewster received Lifetime Achievement Awards at DOC NYC, the nation’s largest and most prestigious nonfiction film festival.
Elijah Wald: “Dylan and Springsteen: Biographies and Biopics”
11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Elijah Wald is the author of Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015), the book that inspired the blockbuster movie, A Complete Unknown (2025), starring Timothy Chalamet as Dylan, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. The film received eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. Reviewing the book for The Guardian, John Harris called it, “a great work of scholarship, brimming with insight – among the best music books I have ever read.” Wald’s newest book is Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (2024). NPR music critic Ann Powers called it, “A hot and essential read.”
​Warren Zanes: “Dylan and Springsteen: Biographies and Biopics”
11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Warren Zanes, writer and notable rock musician, is the bestselling author of Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (2023), the basis of the 2025 film, SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. The biography was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the Boston Globe called it, “Brilliant” and said, “For fans of American music, Deliver Me from Nowhere makes a great ghost story.” Zanes’s previous bestseller was Petty: The Biography (2015), one of Rolling Stone's 10 Best Music Books of the Year. At the age of 17, Zanes became the lead guitarist of the 1980s garage-band sensation, The Del Fuegos. He currently teaches cultural studies at NYU.