MacArthur Fellow and Emmy Award-Winning Filmmaker Stanley Nelson Joins Film and Politican Science Faculty

Stanley Nelson, who most recently directed A Place of Our Own, a PBS documentary about his summers in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, a resort town on the island of Martha's Vineyard.

Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson has been named the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor in Public Policy and Administration at Brooklyn College for the 2004–2005 academic year.

Nelson is a MacArthur Fellow who has had more than twenty years of experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos. The Murder of Emmett Till, shown as part of PBS's American Experience series, earned an Emmy for best nonfiction direction, an Emmy nomination for screenwriting, and a Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Among Nelson’s other films are Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (2000); and The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (1999), which won the Freedom of Expression Award at Sundance in 1999. His most recent production is A Place of Our Own (2003), a documentary about Oak Bluffs, the predominantly black resort community on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard, where he spent his childhood summers.

While at the College, Nelson will hold a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Film and will teach a course in each department during the academic year.

A graduate of the Leonard Davis Film School at the City University of New York, Nelson has taught film production at Howard University. He has been a fellow of the American Film Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Washington, D.C., Commission for the Arts, and a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. For three years, Nelson served on the selection panel for the Fulbright fellowship in film. In spring 1997, he was named a University Regents Lecturer at the University of California, San Diego.

The Visiting Professor in Public Policy and Administration at Brooklyn College is named for Belle Zeller, a political science professor who started teaching in 1927 at the Brooklyn extension of Hunter College, which joined with the Brooklyn extension of City College in 1930 to become Brooklyn College. She taught at Brooklyn College for more than forty years and published extensively in the field. In 1972, Zeller became the first president of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents the faculty of the City University of New York.