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• 1 2022-05-09T07:30:12-07:00 The Film Team 26 plain 2023-05-23T12:42:49-07:00 The OHL's Film team consists of professors Mary Leonard, Guillermo Gómez, and Raisa Bonnet. Professor Leonard leads the team and oversees major aspects of the film component, while Bonnet and Gómez teach the courses titled Introduction to Documentary (CINE 3025) and The Creative Documentary (CINE 4016), respectively. Students enrolled in the filmmaking courses create oral history documentaries that become part of the OHL’s permanent collection and “behind-the-scenes” process videos that serve as learning resources for future students.
  
  Bios
  
  Mary Leonard has a PhD in Literature from the University of the West Indies. She is the founder and director of the UPRM Film Certificate, an 18 credit curricular sequence in film which has been offering courses since 2007. Film Certificate students have gone on to win prizes at film festivals and study film at the graduate level in renowned programs such as those of Columbia University, New York University, Columbia College in Chicago, the American Film Institute, and the University of Texas at Austin. She has organized and been involved in many film and media projects of different kinds at UPRM and elsewhere since the 1990s. She is the co-founder of the Cine Club Colegial, a film series that presented international and art films at the university at a time when these films were not available locally. In 1999, she inaugurated the film elective in the English department, a course that is now the most popular elective in the department. She currently teaches the film history and film theory courses of the Film Certificate. In 2018 she lectured on film in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María and showed films by Puerto Rican filmmakers at three campuses of The City University of New York, the University of Delaware, Middlebury College, Amherst College, and Wellesley College. She has originated, designed, recruited talent, and produced a variety of film and media projects such as the 2019 web series “La Uni,” made for UPRM, with a $120,000 budget. She was co-organizer of the conference Mapping New Caribbean Film held in Santo Domingo in 2020, and is co-founder and currently co-hosts an online series of conversations with Caribbean filmmakers called Caribbean Film Forum.
  
  Raisa Bonnet is a film director, producer, and screenwriter who received her masters in film, with a concentration in screenwriting, from New York University in 2016. She also studied screenwriting and directing in Argentina. In addition to directing her own films, she has worked as a photographer, cinematographer, film editor, and producer on other projects. Her celebrated 2013 short film Luna Vieja was an official selection in many A-List film festivals and has been widely shown. Since then she has written and directed other short films, documentaries, music videos and commercials. Her feature film, produced by Annabelle Mullen, one of Puerto Rico’s most renowned producers, is currently in development and has been selected for workshops and development at important international film festivals. She is the recipient of many scholarships, grants, and awards. She has taught the required screenwriting course for the UPRM Film Certificate since 2015, as well as workshops on film directing, cinematography, film production, editing, and film history at UPRM and elsewhere.
  
  Guillermo Gomez Alvarez received his masters degree in Audiovisual Production from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras in 2005 and a masters in Creative Documentary from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2007. He made his first short film in 1996, and since then has gone on to direct many music videos for important Puerto Rican bands like Orquesta Macabeo, as well as short and long documentaries. His films have a recognizable style and approach that make him one of the foremost documentary filmmakers in Puerto Rico. He received an Emmy for Máter Atómica, his series of short films about a nuclear reactor in Rincón, Puerto Rico. Gomez Alvarez has taught the required film production course for the UPRM Film Certificate since 2008, and regularly offers editing and post production workshops at UPRM.