Faculty Directory

Rachel Callman

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BA in Advertising, University of Florida
Rachel is a comedy writer who has written for the Comedy Central show Tosh.O and worked for the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards. She is the Director of Operations for Untitled Ladies Script Club and a mentor at Made In Her Image. She currently has a comedic biopic about the co-founder of OPI Nail Lacquer in development at Cavalry Media with Dana Brunetti (The Social Networ, Captain Phillips) with Robert Luketic attached to direct and a half-hour pilot in development with Idina Menzel’s Loudmouth Media. In the Screenwriting Department in LA, she teaches Comedy Writing, Adaptation, Story Generation, and TV Workshops.

Tony Candelaria

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Tony Candelaria began his career at Cafe FX in Santa Maria CA. as a CG modeler for feature films and television. In 2001 Tony worked at Warner Bros animation, developing and animating pilots. in 2005 he worked at Laika animation, making stop-motion animation for films, Coraline and Paranorman. Currently, he is creating puppets for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio at Shadow Machine. Tony lives in Los Angeles.

Hal Cantor

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MA in Dramatic Writing, NYU; MS in Journalism, Northwestern University.
Hal writes television, film, and theater. He is currently writing on the second season of Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman for The History Channel. His comedy, To Hal & Back, was optioned by Sony Pictures Television. He wrote on Fusion channel’s acclaimed special, The Naked Truth: Dirty Little Secrets, which broke The Panama Papers story. Prior to that, his drama pilot, Mouthpiece, was bought by Fox Television Studios. He wrote The Lake Effect, a one-hour drama pilot for Showtime, developed with Emmy-winning director Scott Winant. Hal also sold the drama pilot, Twilight, to Sony Pictures Television. In features, he developed a comedy with John Davis Productions. Hal’s had multiple plays produced. His new one-man show, The Importance of Being Anxious, debuted at London’s Camden Fringe. For the Screenwriting Department in LA, he teaches Online Screenwriting courses in Television.

Denise Carlson

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Denise Carlson is a producer, consultant and development executive with twenty five years of experience in the entertainment industry. She was at Disney Channel for 9 years as the Director of Original Movies, responsible for overseeing the development and production of 47 television movies, including the megahit High School Musical, as well as other highly successful films such as Wendy Wu and The Cheetah Girls movies. She has also produced series for Disney+ and independent productions. She is on the board of the LA Femme film festival, which is dedicated to presenting films that are made by and about women. She has a BFA from Rollins College and a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology from Ryokan College.

Roxanne Captor

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Roxanne Messina Captor is an Emmy-nominated, Humanitas Prize-winning creator/ producer/writer/director. She executive produced and wrote the story for Hallmark Channel’s Dream Moms, starring Tamera Mowry-Housley and Chelsea Hobbs, premiering on May 13. Captor admits. “I always write from personal experience,” and fortunately, she’s had an interesting life to draw from, but she is equally focused on elevating others, especially women, to gain a foothold in the entertainment industry. Towards that end, Messina Captor is a current member of the California Arts Council, appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom, and she’s currently a Film and Television Studies professor at New York Film Academy and Santa Monica College, after teaching at Cal Arts, Emerson LA, UCLA and Loyola Marymount.

Messina Captor received the Emmy nomination and a Humanitas Prize for producing CBS’ Home Sweet Homeless, she also directed and produced Lifetime’s Her Married Lover and CBS’ Fatal Vows, produced HBO’s Dead on Sight, and wrote/produced/directed and choreographed countless other award-winning shorts and theatrical productions. Messina Captor is the former Executive Director of the San Francisco International Film Festival and Film Society, and she was awarded France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her producing/directing work in films.

It all began in Chicago, when her mother, a ballet dancer, gave up her career to become a devoted mom who inspired her daughter’s appreciation for the arts, especially dance. Messina Captor was accepted into the Chicago Lyric Opera at 12 after dancing as a child in Equity musicals and at the Goodman Theatre, followed by stints in NY’s Harkness Ballet, the Béjart Ballet in Brussels and Paris and guesting at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet before eventually being cast in Bob Fosse’s Pippin on Broadway after 11 previous rejections for Fosse shows. She also danced on-screen in the films The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Xanadu and Pennies from Heaven, and she became the assistant choreographer to Gene Kelly on her mentor Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart. “By age 30, I and most dancers are looking for new careers as their bodies are done,” says Messina Captor. She became one of the founding production executives at TNT. Overseeing other people’s films helped her clarify her actual goal of being a creator herself and telling her own stories as a producer/writer and director. Messina Captor confessed, “I realized that my dance skills of passion, discipline, organization and dedication, coupled with my network exec background, were perfectly suited to producing, so I never looked back and stayed happily behind the camera ever since.”

Messina Captor’s awarding-winning documentary shorts, Homecoming: Veterans, Wives and Mothers and Thank You for Your Service also screened at the UN and Doctor Biden’s Common Defense Organization. Her award-winning short, A Couple of White Chicks at the Hairdresser premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner before debuting on Comedy Central.

With multiple films and TV series in pre-production or development, Messina Captor continues to find inspiration for her future projects all around, but her best source material is always found in the woman in the mirror.

Neil Casey

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Neil Casey is a cinematographer whose body of work includes feature films, short films, documentaries, music videos, and live events. He started his career in New York, where he worked as a camera operator and lighting technician for film and television before moving to Los Angeles to earn his master’s degree. For over a decade he has had the pleasure of working with a variety of artists and companies, including Stan Lee’s World of Heroes and POW! Entertainment. At NYFA, Neil works to teach aspiring directors and cinematographers the art, practices, and technologies that exist in the ever-evolving world of cinematography.

Christopher Cass Acting for Film Instructor

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BA in Theatre, University of Georgia. NY and LA credits include “Rounding Third,” “Jerusalem,” “Gaining Ground,” “RFK” (Off-Broadway), “Sleepwalk,” “Born in the RSA,” “Much Ado” (Central Park), “Henry V” (Off-Broadway) and “Macbeth.” Television credits include: “ER,” “Like Family,” “Tucker,” “Fired Up,” “Cedric the Entertainer,” “Night Court,” and many more.

Craig Caton

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Craig started out by doing makeup effects and animatronic puppets on movies such as Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Tremors, and Ghostbusters. Moving into the digital era, he worked as a character technical director for Disney Feature Animation and for DreamWorks Animation as a layout artist. Working for Stan Winston, Craig supervised the creation of a network of Silicon Graphics workstations that would later become a core piece of the Digital Domain when Stan partnered with James Cameron and Scott Ross. He is credited as one of the eight co-founders of Digital Domain.

Edward Cha

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MFA in Film, UCLA TFT
Ed Cha is a writer-director-producer of film and theater. He has worked as a Technical Director for theater, working with world-renowned artists including, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, and Oguri. As a Line Producer, he has produced for the Rolling Stones, and produced Katie Q, Shuffle, and Hello Herman. His company Mean Panda Productions is overseeing a short film production series anthology Three Palms, View Obscured focusing on the themes of homes and homelessness. Ed’s has written and will direct one of the shorts, My Honey Bee. For the Screenwriting Department in LA, he teaches Storytelling with Purpose, Scene Study, Elements of Screenwriting, and Feature Workshops. For the Filmmaking Department in LA, he teaches Thesis Prep and Producing.

Sally Chun

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Sally Chun earned her M.Ed. in Postsecondary Administration & Student Affairs at USC and her B.A. in Communication at UCSB. Her area of study targets student affairs – exploring the correlation between race and socioeconmic status vs. student success and experience in higher education. Prior to joining NYFA, she served as the Student Services Advisor for USC graduate students and as a Senior Seminar Instructor for the federal educational TRIO program – Upward Bound. Currently, she teaches LAS courses at the NYFA – Los Angeles campus and also serves the Academic Affairs Manager for BFA Filmmaking & BA Media Studies students.

Jay Cipriani

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Jay Cipriani received his BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from WVU, studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and received his MFA in Film Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

He began his career in story development and production working with writer/director Barry Levinson, producers Paula Weinstein, Len Amato, and Palak Patel, and later with writer Ted Griffin.

In 2008, he joined HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm assisting the show’s writing team, Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel.

2009’s A Golden Christmas, ION’s first original film, was Jay’s first produced screenplay and he has since written many more films including Hallmark’s Christmas Land and Carole’s Christmas for OWN.

Jay has story consulted on various projects throughout his career as well as being recognized in various screenwriting competitions, the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship, New Blood, Top 100 Emerging Screenwriters, Top 25 Spotlight Screenwriting Competition and The Tracking Board Top 25 Launch Pad to name a few. His scripts have also been top submissions on both the Black List website and Spec Scout. In 2015 he won Chicago’s Pride Films and Plays Screenwriting Competition where his screenplay SOMEBODY TO LOVE was performed live.

James H. Coburn IV CAS

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James H. Coburn IV has been teaching production sound at college level for fifteen years. He is a Production Sound Mixer of 25 independent feature films, including The Bronx Bull, Free Enterprise and All’s Faire In Love, and TV series including Roger Corman’s Black Scorpion and Guru To Go for Discovery Networks. He was one of the mixers on the 2015 documentary Kobe Bryant’s Muse. His most recent project was consulting about sound and mixing for the documentary feature, Be The Beauty, which showcases Poet Laureates around the country. Before turning to mixing he was a boom operator and has worked on numerous network TV series, documentary projects and features. A long-time member and former Board member of the Cinema Audio Society, he was instrumental in creating the CAS Technical Awards. James wrote the Foreword to the authorized biography of his Oscar-winning father, “Dervish Dust: The Life and Words of James Coburn” (Potomac Books, 2021) and is currently working on a new book about the art of Production Sound mixing.

Eric Conner

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MFA, USC School of Cinema and Television
Eric has collaborated on screenplays with Robert Gardner (Writer, The Wedding Palace) and is developing a pilot with Hayden Black (Goodnight Burbank, Gen Zed). He is currently a regular contributor to ranker.com. As part of a team, he adapted the New York Times bestselling young-adult series Vampire Kisses and developed a feature film based on Knott’s Berry Farm’s Halloween Haunt. He currently hosts, produces and writes the podcast The Backlot for NYFA and was previously commissioned to write the original one-act play/short film The Also-Rans. He is the winner of the Sloan Award & Hamptons’ Writer’s Workshop for feature script Just Enough. He worked as a production manager on the documentary The Cutting Edge: The Story of Cinema Editing. His interview subjects include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Sean Penn. For the Screenwriting Department in LA, he teaches TV Workshops, Introduction to Television, Rewriting, and Thesis Workshops.

Anastasia Coon Academic Advisor

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BFA in Theatre – Acting Emphasis, Chapman University. Conservatory Training Certificate, Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre. MFA Acting, UT Austin. Adjunct Instructor at USC, Teaching Artist: Pasadena Playhouse, Guest Artist: Directors Lab West, Board Member: 2nd Sundays Screenplays LA.

Javier Costa

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Steadicam operator with over 10 years professional experience in the camera department. Active member of the Society of Camera Operators, The Steadicam Guild, and IATSE Local 600. Credits include commercials for clients such as McDonald’s and Target, music videos for artists such as Ice Cube and Megadeath, operating Technocrane on the documentary “Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron”, and television shows including “Survivor”.

Merrilyn Crouch

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Merrilyn Crouch received an MFA in Theater from The University of Southern California and has worked as an actor, writer and director in commericals, television, and film for over 20 years. Merrilyn has written, produced and directed promos for clients including CNN International, TNT, FOX, Discovery Channel, NUVO TV and others. She can be seen on the Food Network’s Good Eats in the recurring role as Alton Brown’s sister, Marsha.