Students and faculty earn 2021 Broadcast Education Awards

Seventeen Rowan University students and one faculty member were honored in March through the Broadcast Education Association’s annual Festival of Media Arts.

The competition, which announced Best of Festival winners March 29, honored Rowan students and faculty from a range of disciplines within the Ric Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts including many who produced films, audio materials, podcasts and promotions.

Much of the work entered into this year’s festival was made amid the Covid-19 lockdown last spring as classrooms, buildings and campuses closed across the nation. The closure forced communication students and faculty, who always pride themselves on their creativity, to be truly inventive in completing their work.

“It was so hard,” said Claire McKissick, a 2020 Radio, Television & Film graduate who directed “The Mayor”, which received 2nd Place honors in the Short Form Documentary category.

McKissick said the 30-minute film celebrates the exuberance of a hearing impaired young man, a cousin of one of her collaborators.

She made the film with four other students from Professor Diana Nicolae’s Advanced Film class who shared the BEA honor: producer Paisley Blair; cinematographer Kyle Foor;  production assistant AnnaRose Rubright; and editor Taylor Corson.

“Paisley’s pitch was about her cousin and her family and we were going to focus on his school in Connecticut, which is for people with disabilities and who are deaf,” said McKissick, a broadcasting director at WBOC in Salisbury, Md. “We were going to focus on him making friends at school but, when Covid hit, we couldn’t go to Connecticut, so for one of our interviews our producer had to show up on the porch with the door open and zoom in to do the interview.”

Not only did “The Mayor” do well at the BEA but the film this week was named a winner in the Documentary Short - College competition of the Garden State Film Festival.

Other Rowan BEA honorees for 2021 include:

Students

Adam Clark & Ralph Quidone: 2nd Place Educational Audio - Together: An Audio Documentary on Latino Immigrants in South Jersey

Peter Costantino: 1st Place PSA/Promo/Commercial - Christmas in July

Ryan Bussell: Award of Excellence Podcasts - A History of the Golden Age of Gaming

Eric Posey, Marissa Armandi, Gary Panter: Award of Excellence Short Form Documentary - City of Sisterly Love

Jody Moser, Victoria Todorova, Frank Villareal, Samuel Kramer: Award of Excellence Short Form Documentary - Bigorexia

Jake Campbell: Award of Excellence Animation - A Predictable 2020 Cartoon

Riel Dioquino: Award of Excellence Animation - Lost and Found

Zach Goldberg: 3rd Place Instructional/Educational Video - Unfiltered TV

Katie Francis: 2nd Place Radio Newscast - ​The Rowan Report

Faculty

Chris Winkler: Award of Excellence Promotional Video - The Nutcracker