Two new faculty members will join the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design this fall: Manfred Becker and Mary Bunch.
“It’s exciting to welcome Manfred and Mary to the AMPD community,” said Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt, interim dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. “Their disciplinary rigour and teaching excellence will support our mission of preparing tomorrow’s creative pioneers whose skills and talent will shape the future.”
Manfred Becker
Manfred Becker joins the Department of Cinema and Media Arts as assistant professor with a full-time faculty position, and previously taught editing and story editing at York and Ryerson Universities, as well as Seneca and Humber Colleges. Since arriving in Toronto in 1983 from Germany, he has held many prestigious positions in film, beginning with the National Film Board (NFB). He was principal editor for Barna-Alper Productions for their non-fiction work, and has earned many producer and writer credits. He has edited feature-length documentaries for several Canadian filmmakers and his work has been screened internationally. Becker has several writing and directing credits for documentary work in television, and is the recipient of the Donald Brittain Gemeni for best social-political documentary in Canada. More recently, he has directed and written for the CBC, and also serves as an advisor, web documentary director and writer for the NFB interactive website.
Mary Bunch
Mary Bunch joins AMPD as assistant professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts, and affiliated with Theatre Studies and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA). She earned her PhD in theory and criticism at Western University in 2011. Bunch’s teaching and research interests include interdisciplinary and collaborative critical disability, feminist, queer studies and critical theory, research creation and arts-based methodologies. She works at the intersection of the political imagination and its visual/sensory expressions. Her current project on “ecstatic freedom” engages theoretical, activist and arts epistemologies as these re-envision the forms that democratic participation, political belonging and justice take. She has published articles in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; Feminist Theory; Culture, Theory and Critique; and the Canadian Journal of Human Rights. Previously, Bunch has taught at McGill University, the University of Toronto and Western University.