Faculty/StaffJennifer Saffron
Since 2000, Jen has developed and taught permanent course offerings in photographic criticism, including writing-intensive courses. She is a former assistant dean and assistant to the Provost, and is the founding director of the PITT ARTS program (www.pittarts.pitt.edu), a national model for student engagement in the arts. In her creative scholarship, Jen Saffron produces and writes about media in relation to social and political action. Her projects involve partnering with socially committed non-profits to produce community-based media as a form of advocacy, ethnography, and empowerment. This includes creating youth media literacy projects with neighborhood groups, using cameras as a tool for youth to examine critical community issues such as race relations, collective and personal identity, and public safety. Recently, her service-learning media course produced a video of oral histories of former civil rights activists, which won first prize at Cinemocracy, a juried film competition held in conjunction with the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In addition to service-based media in Alabama, Jen has partnered with grassroots non-profits in Northern Ireland, the Navajo Nation, and Jamaica. (Visit www.amizade.org for more information.) At the University of Pittsburgh, she has developed and teaches courses such as: Photography of War, Conflict and Protest; Photography and its Social and Political Context; and American Photography/American Culture. Jen earned her BFA in fine art from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in photography from Bard College, and regularly exhibits and curates exhibitions of photography and film. Currently on view in SPACE Gallery is an exhibition of Czech photography that she curated with Eva Heyd, the director of the Prague House of Photography. As well as curatorial work, Jen is a regular speaker and panelist, and writes independently for media journals and publications, most recently for Afterimage, which will include her essay on media pedagogy as action in fall 2009. Her email is saffron@pitt.edu |
Film in PittsburghCelebrated Pittsburgh director, George Romero 
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Jennifer Saffron is an adjunct instructor in Film Studies and English. You are using an older browser that does not support current Web standards. Although this site is viewable in all browsers, it will look much better in a browser that supports Web standards.