PaceDocs New Film: Viola da Terra: Harmony of the Azores
Pace University’s award-winning student documentary team, PaceDocs, premiered their latest film, Viola da Terra: Harmony of the Azores, on May 5, 2025, at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. The film also premiered in Terceira, Portugal.
The team filmed over spring break on Portugal’s Azorean islands of São Miguel and Terceira. The film explores the story of the Viola da Terra, a traditional 12-15 string instrument with deep roots in Azorean identity, music, and cultural preservation.
The documentary was co-produced by Dyson College of Arts and Sciences Professors Maria Luskay, EdD, and Lou Guarneri, MA, and Pace University’s documentary student film team. It is the focus of the popular class Producing the Documentary, which is part of the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University’s highly regarded film program that requires students to complete a full-length documentary within 14 weeks. During the process, students learn teamwork, problem-solving, research, and organization, along with technical skills such as lighting, sound, camera work, interviewing, and other real-life lessons necessary to complete a film.
Serving the Education Community
With more than three decades of experience making significant contributions to documentary production and experiential education at Pace, Professor of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts Maria Luskay, EdD, has served as an expert on the Bovée/Thill Faculty Advisory Board and was a contributor in the 16th edition of the Pearson textbook Business Communication Today.
L to R: MCVA Alumni Jessica Pietryka, Rachel Skopp-Cardillo, Max Vuolle, and Dev Stafford
Emmy-winning Alumni
Six Media, Communications, and Visual Arts alumni, Briana Cuttino ’20, Jessica Pietryka ’20, Rachel Skopp-Cardillo ‘20, Dev Stafford ’20, Max Vuolle ’20, and Matthew West ’09, ’11, have each won Emmy awards for the 2024 Paris Olympics coverage they worked on.
Drones Take Flight
The Department of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts (MCVA) introduced a new 13-credit Drone Operations and Applications certificate. The certificate builds upon the MCVA department’s long-standing Making Media with Drones course by including additional coursework in media ethics, environmental monitoring, and GIS mapping. The certificate is highly experiential, providing students with hands-on experience flying drones and using them to gather data, and preparing them to become commercial drone pilots, which are increasingly in demand in a broad range of industries. The certificate also bolsters Pace’s reputation as a leader in drone education. Pace was the first four-year institution in New York to become a member of the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Collegiate Training Initiative (UAS-CTI) program.
📚 Dyson Authors
Recent books by faculty
Drift Net: The Aesthetics of
Literature and Media in Migration
Chris Campanioni, PhD, English, with four publications
Campanioni theorizes an aesthetics of transmedia as a framework for civic activism, while showing how migrants have forecasted and reshaped new media practices and norms, producing a political subjectivity that resists subjectification.
north by north/west
This work’s theme is collage and montage, both of which are used in the text to articulate a diasporic phenomenology. Its textual engine reads like plot: an unnamed narrator attempts to remake the 1959 Hitchcock film.
VHS
With hypermediation as its subject, the book’s narrator is trying to find out more about his parents’ pasts, though they rarely talk about their childhoods before coming to the United States.
Windows 85
Identity and co-presence in the age of platform capitalism and transmediation is at the heart of this poetry collection, a “networked intimacy” the author has engaged with for many years both in research and teaching.
Secret New York City: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure
Rossilynne Culgan, MA (adjunct professor), Communication and Media Studies
Encouraging people to get outside and explore New York City, this book is a scavenger hunt in the nation’s largest city, a guidebook that goes off the beaten path far beyond the reaches of the subway map.
The Psychology and Science of Pseudoscience
Terence Hines, PhD, Psychology
The central theme of this work is that people accept pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs because of normal brain and cognitive processes. This may result in perceiving things that aren’t, remembering things that didn’t happen, and interpreting normal events as evidence for something paranormal.
Tilt: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma
Meghana Nayak, PhD, Political Science
This novel is an immersive examination of what it means for our bodies, families, and global politics to hold on to oppression, wherein personal and political wounds get stored and reenacted.
Science with Impact
Anne Toomey, PhD, Environmental Studies and Science
Toomey tackles what it means to have one’s science make a difference in the real world and addresses how research can make its way into policy and shift societal norms in a meaningful way.
Le handicap dans la littérature féminine au XIXe siècle en France (Representation of Disability in Nineteenth-Century French Women’s Writing)
Ying Wang, PhD, Modern Languages and Cultures
Wang examines the complex, often-overlooked role of disability in nineteenth-century French women’s literature, exploring how disabled figures are represented in the novels of four women writers, revealing how these portrayals intersect with gender, social norms, and the constraints placed on women’s writing at the time.
