York University graduate student Geoffrey Alan Rhodes has been named a 2005 Canada-US Fulbright Fellow, an honour reserved for a select few in Canada and the US. Rhodes, a graduate of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, studied film and has recently begun a PhD in Communication & Culture at York.
Right: Alan Rhodes
“Mr. Rhodes is a talented and impressive student of film and culture,” said Michael K. Hawes, executive director of the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the United States of America. “His innovative cross-border collaboration work serves as a model for both Canadian and American students of the arts.”
Rhodes stumbled across film studies after exploring various other aspects of the arts, including the completion of an undergraduate degree in Italian from the University of Washington. After completing a second undergraduate degree in media studies, Rhodes went on to complete his MFA in media arts from SUNY at Buffalo. Rhodes immersed himself in the local Buffalo art scene, exploring new styles and new mediums. His hard work earned him numerous accolades, including the national Princess Grace Foundation award which supported his thesis film.
While in Canada, Rhodes intends to pursue his interest in the theoretical analysis of contemporary multi-window-channel video environments in terms of Deleuze and Bergson’s theories of time and the image, and their correlation to the rise of the image in cinema and photography at the turn of the century.
Upon returning to the US, Rhodes hopes to set up an active network among media artists in Toronto, Buffalo and New York which will serve as a launch pad for collaborative film and video-installation productions.
The generosity of The John R. Oishei Foundation contributes significantly to the ability of the Canada-US Fulbright Program to support Rhodes.
A premiere academic exchange program, the Fulbright attracts exceptional scholars from more than 150 countries worldwide. Among the fastest growing of the bilateral exchanges is the Canada-US Fulbright Program. Named for former US senator J. William Fulbright and supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs Canada and the US Department of State, the Canada-US Fulbright Program has engaged more than 800 scholars in high-level academic exchanges since 1990.