Melinda Levin

UNT Faculty Profile

Bio

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Melinda Levin has produced, directed, edited, and photographed films around the world, including VIRGINIA HOUSE (in production in Surrey County, Virginia, USA), CUBAN EARTH (Havana & Pinar del Rio, Cuba), MONGOLIA: EARTH AND SPIRIT(Ulaanbaatar and Darkhan, Mongolia), RIVER PLANET (Brazil, India, Slovakia, Thailand & the United States), THE NEW FRONTIER: SUSTAINABLE RANCHING IN THE AMERICAN WEST (Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, USA), STANDING ON THE EDGE WATCHING (New York City, USA), and THE MAYAN DREAMS OF CHAN KOM (Yucatan and Quintana Roo, Mexico). These and her other internationally honored documentaries have screened on PBS (where she received a retrospective in 2018), the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as well as multiple U.S. Embassies, theatres, and screening outlets worldwide. She is currently in production on an international documentary series entitled RIVER BENEATH THE RIVER that documents location-based trauma and various healing modalities.

She taught for 28 years as a professor of documentary media in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, additionally serving as Department Chair and Director of the Master of Fine Arts graduate program in Documentary Production and Studies. She now holds the honorary title Professor Emerita. As part of her commitment to global outreach, she also served on the U.S. Department of State’s Speakers Bureau, traveling to Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Her academic service to the media field has also been exemplary: she was president, and is Life Member, of the University Film and Video Association (the premiere academic organization for media makers and scholars) and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Film and Video. She co-authored the book Post: Theory and Technique of Digital, Nonlinear Motion Picture Editing, and contributed to the book Sushi in Cortez: Interdisciplinary Essays on Mesa Verde. She also consulted for NATO, co-authoring the article “Counter Terrorism, Human Rights and Social Media” for the NATO Science for Peace and Security Series. More recently Professor Levin earned a competitive fellowship with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Enterprise Forum in support of her work designing web applications for location-based reporting and storytelling. She serves as founder of a company currently in the investment phase for a media platform called 1EarthStory. 

Courses

• Documentary Production - International
• Environmental Documentary
• Multi-platform Production
• Ethnography and Cultural Analysis