Quinn Saunders is an award-winning film and television director and educator.  He is currently the Co-Producer and Director of the television series Lucha Underground airing on El Rey and Unimas, as well as the CBS series Big Brother.

Quinn’s most recent feature film, The Apparition, will be released in 2015, and his first feature film, Cherry., premiered in 2010 at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and was distributed by Warner Brothers Digital.  Screen Daily described Cherry. as “Broodingly memorable,” and Horrornews.com said, “It keeps you thinking long after the credits roll.”  Cherry. was awarded Best Production at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, and won the Audience Award at the Charleston International Film Festival.

Thelma Vickroy, a tenured professor and head of the Electronic Media Management option at California State University Northridge Department of Cinema and Television Arts. She is also the coordinator of the CTVA internship program and a senior member of the television production faculty.

After graduating with a M.F.A. in film and television from New York University, Thelma Vickroy began her career working for documentarian Robert Drew, a founder of direct cinema. She is an experienced award winning producer and director in both documentary and non-fiction television. These works include My Father the President, winner of a Cine Eagle and American Film Festival Blue Ribbon, and An Evening of Forbidden Books, broadcast on PBS. Extraordinarily Ordinary, was an official selection at DocuWeek Theatrical Documentary Showcase (former called DOCtober, the International Documentary Association film festival), Lake Arrowhead Film Festival and qualified for consideration for an Academy Award in the documentary shorts category. The third in a series of portrait-style documentaries, Ahmed, Say Something Funny was an official selection at the Dubai Film Market. The documentary also won Best Documentary and Best Comedy feature at the Action on Film (AOF) Festival 2008.

As a member of PACT5, a five universities collaborative documentary project, Thelma was a principal investigator of a Wyncote Foundation grant (Summer 2012-Fall 2013) to produce and supervise a student created documentary to address the social issues of sexual assault and rape on college campuses. Selected students from her Fall 2012 senior thesis course, Directing the TV Documentary (CTVA 441), produced a 10-minute documentary titled 1000XNo: Students Giving Voice To A Silent Epidemic. This work can be seen at the PACT5 web site: www.pact5.org

Additionally, Professor Vickroy was a consultant on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Campus Suicide Prevention federal grant received by California State University Northridge. She selected students from the television option to produce media to be used in awareness and education addressing the social issue of suicide and suicide prevention for college students (Fall 2012-Summer 2015). Thelma has received other funding support for her work from the Research and Creative Activities Grant from the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication at California State University Northridge to support Archive Library of American Documentary Filmmaker (2007/2008) and the documentary Ahmed, Say Something Funny (2006/2007).

Professor Vickroy students’ documentaries have won many awards in film festivals and national award competitions. Thelma is a former board member of the International Documentary Association. She is also one of the founders of DOCS ROCK, a high school documentary production curriculum in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Thelma has shared her knowledge and experience of education and documentary production on professional panels. She has written about the world of documentary, non-fiction filmmaking and television in published articles.

The Courses Professor Vickroy teaches:

• CTVA 240 Beginning Television Production
• CTVA 305  History of Broadcasting
• CTVA 340 Advance Video Production and Editing
• CTVA 341 Single-Camera Video Production and Editing
• CTVA 440 Theory and Techniques of TV Directing
• CTVA 441 Directing the TV Documentary 
• CTVA 494 C, F   Undergraduate Internship
• CTVA 694 C  Graduate Internship

Education

• B.A. English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• M.A. Documentary Film Production (coursework only), Stanford University
• M.F.A. Screenwriting, University of Southern California.

About Me

Scott teaches undergraduate and graduate screenwriting and is CTVA’s Graduate Screenwriting Program Coordinator. He has written (and rewritten) film and television scripts for Sony, Universal, Warner Bros., Touchstone, New Line, NBC and CBS. He developed and sold projects with Michael Douglas, Barry Sonnenfeld and Kevin Costner among others.

Recently, he and his writing partner set up a feature screenplay comedy, The Coachmen, with Seth MacFarlane’s production company, Fuzzy Door. They are currently writing an independently financed feature-length musical. And Scott is Executive Producing a low-budget indie horror film scheduled to shoot in Nova Scotia early this spring.

In the more distant past, he also produced two low-budget independent features. The psychological horror film, MAY, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002 and sold there to Lionsgate Films. THE ELDER SON, which he also co-wrote, premiered at the 2007 Hamptons International Film Festival and stars Leelee Sobieski and Shane West.

He began his career with Michael Douglas’s Stonebridge Entertainment as Director of Development where he worked on projects including FLATLINERS and MADE IN AMERICA.

Before joining CSUN’s full-time faculty in 2012, Scott taught screenwriting as an adjunct professor at USC. He is a member of the WGA.

Favorite film currently Parasite.

Favorite TV series currently Ted Lasso.

Favorite ways to procrastinate include watching the Dodgers, mountain biking, yoga and getting dragged through the canyons by his dog.