By Alex Joseph
Part hands-on filmmaking, part film history and theory, and all industry-savvy, FIT’s Film and Media program launched 10 years ago, offering distinctive AAS and BS degrees. The department provides an affordable alternative to other film programs, and welcomes a more diverse crop of students. Alumni have become video archivists, editors, producers of various media and, yes, filmmakers, each with a unique perspective. “It’s very important that students find their own voice,” says Dahlia Schweitzer, department chair. The program hasn’t produced an Ava DuVernay or Steven Spielberg (yet!), but grads are working with top filmmakers and studios.
To commemorate the anniversary, we’re spotlighting faculty and notable alumni of the program.
Dahlia Schweitzer, associate professor and chair
After becoming chair in 2023, Schweitzer updated course offerings, adding classes on drag and cross-dressing, guerilla filmmaking, and television history. (She’s taught in the department since 2019.) She earned a PhD in cinema and media studies at UCLA and has published academic books about haunted houses, L.A. detectives, and artist Cindy Sherman’s 1997 horror film, Office Killer. “I write for the same reason I watch movies and television,” Schweitzer says. “To help me understand the world.” Gender, race, and sexuality provide lenses for close readings. Her well-timed 2018 book, Going Viral (Rutgers), for example, looked at narratives of contagion such as 28 Days Later (2002) for clues about social bias: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she says, viruses in films frequently came from the Middle East. The topics may be gruesome—Schweitzer recently provided commentary for a Fox docuseries about convicted murderers the Menendez Brothers—but her true goal is to prompt critical engagement, she says. “My aim is to pass on my own curiosity to my students and encourage them to create intellectual connections between the material of a particular course and the world in which they live.”
Josh Koury, PROFESSOR
In spring 2024, when Vanity Fair published a list of the best true-crime documentaries, it included two films directed by Koury, who has taught at FIT since 2016. Voyeur (2017), distributed by Netflix, investigates a contested New Yorker magazine story about a bizarre motel owner; Koury’s other entry, two episodes of HBO’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, follows a writer investigating the Golden State serial killer. “I wouldn’t put myself in a category,” Koury says of his body of work, which includes a film about Harry Potter fanatics and a still-developing project about a TV station run by prison inmates. “Whatever grabs me is where I go.” With Schweitzer as resident film theorist, Koury, the working filmmaker, supports the department with production expertise. His own process guides his pedagogy. Starting in their first semester, students must complete a film of their own every term, a challenge that exposes them to the full range of film work. Koury is most interested in helping students realize their individual potential as artists, a word he views expansively. “I think commercial work is art,” Koury says. “Cinematography is art. There’s incredible artistry in editing.”
Ella Grossbach ’18, freelance archival researcher and associate producer
One of Grossbach’s first assignments in the FIT program was to scrutinize Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). “We had to list every single shot in the film—wide, tight, medium, close-up,” she says. This painstaking attention to detail has served her as a freelance archival researcher. Today, a director might tell Grossbach, “I want a tight shot of a man drinking a beer.” For Hulu’s Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story (2024), she pored over 20,000 stills and 100 hours of footage.
She also worked on Netflix’s Simone Biles Rising and a forthcoming HBO series about baseball celeb Alex Rodriguez. Before FIT, Grossbach thought she might work on narrative fiction films, but an early experience of making a short one for Koury set her straight. “He said, ‘What is this? Why aren’t you making docs? That’s what you’re best at.’” Grossbach says. “I loved how honest he was.” And she’s been faithful to her passion for documentaries since. She hopes her role as associate producer for a still-developing project about Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett heralds her future. She loves shaping narrative. “At FIT, I learned to look for moments,” she says. “Is this shot moving the story forward? If it’s not, it’s not important. I want to serve a story.”
Cliff Benfield ’18, creator of Space Skits and more
In a sketch from Benfield’s animated video series Space Skits, a vulture in a desert refuses to share his drinking straw with a man dying of thirst. “I’m the worst germaphobe, really,” the bird explains. “Ask any of my friends!” Space Skits also features a traffic-stopping moose, a flirty toucan, and a shark on a date that goes way, way wrong. The six-year-old channel of 25- to 40-second sketches has over a million followers on TikTok and 630,000 on Instagram. It all started at FIT, when a class in After Effects software showed Benfield how to animate drawings he created in Illustrator. Immediately, the aspiring comic writer saw the opportunity to share his talents online. The key was consistency: He challenged himself to deliver a short in the same punchy, deadpan style every week. The routine paid off in followers, and soon the industry noticed. A talent manager reached out on LinkedIn. Placements on the Funny or Die website and sketches for the Adult Swim arm of Cartoon Network followed, as well as support from Emmy-winning animation studio Bento Box. An even more tantalizing possibility is in the offing; in the meantime, Benfield supports himself with sponsored posts for an AI program and a male grooming device. “I thought it would hurt my soul to make them, but it’s pretty fun actually,” he says. Asked for the secret of how to be funny, Benfield shrugs. When faced with the blank page, he has certain go-to themes—like animals. He says, “There’s just something about a deer selling sandwiches that’s funny.”
Erin Willers ’20
When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced, Willers was overjoyed. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, for which Willers worked as the assistant to the executive producer and researcher, received 10. After the eight-month shoot in Oklahoma, Willers became the archivist for Scorsese’s personal video collection. She’s currently on a project with Elara Pictures, the production company best known for the Adam Sandler film Uncut Gems. “Marty taught me that you always have to be open and learning,” she said. “Filmmaking isn’t some magic; it’s about curiosity.”
Willers describes her experience in this video.
William Mun ’21
Whether they know it or not, most prospective FIT students have seen Mun’s work. He’s been making videos for the college for several years, including his admissions film, called “Only at FIT”; a post-Covid short called “What Makes You Optimistic Now?”, and a personal animated piece about the American Dream.
He’s also a successful commercial filmmaker and motion designer, working on projects across automotive, beauty, and food retail sectors for Constellation Software. “It’s been eye-opening learning how to be a storyteller across different genres and projects. Between client and personal work, I’m consistently challenged to look beyond what I know.”
