Dustin Morrow is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, author, programmer and educator. As a media artist, his works frequently explore the intersections of music and the moving image; and issues of and relationships between landscape/space and personal, communal and cultural identities. He was born and raised in western Illinois, and received his MFA in Cinema from the University of Iowa. He taught media production at Temple University in Philadelphia for seven years, and is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches courses in digital cinema production and film studies.
Professor Morrow’s short and feature films have won numerous awards and been shown in major film festivals and other venues around the world. He has written extensively about film and pop culture for a host of online and print publications. Before re-entering academia, Morrow was an editor and director of short-form projects and series television in Los Angeles, for such clients as MTV and the Discovery Channel, and such filmmakers as Spike Jonze, Michael Apted, and Steven Soderbergh. He continues to operate his own independent production company, Little Swan Pictures, for which recent projects have taken him as far away as the Aleutian Sea.
Among his recent works are a feature-film contemporary musical called Everything Went Down; an anthology of short films exploring Irish identity entitled Firinne: Searching for Ireland; The Marriage of Figaro, a production of the classic opera produced for Comcast Television; Laptop, a short documentary about electronic music; and Film versus Film, a cinema discussion forum produced as both a web series and a Comcast television series. In 2013, Focal Press will publish his new textbook Producing for TV and New Media. He is currently writing a book about acting and directing with stage and screen legend Kathleen Turner. Professor Morrow has received grants for his work totaling more than half a million dollars.
Mr. Morrow was the Founding Director of the Greenfield Youth Film Festival, one of the largest youth-centered film education programs in the country, for three years. Presently he is the Founding Director of the Portland Music Video Festival, one of the only festivals in the world dedicated exclusively to the art and craft of music videos. He regularly programs for the Hollywood Theater in Portland, and speaks at conferences and workshops nationwide about issues related to film, music and new media production.
A passionate advocate of study abroad education, Professor Morrow has during his summers run programs in London and Dublin, as well as taught documentary filmmaking in Northern Ireland. At Temple University, he authored a new degree program in Globalization and Intercultural Communication. Morrow is also an active promoter of art therapy programs, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Arts and the Quality of Life Research Center, the internationally prominent Philadelphia-based art therapy advocacy organization.
Contact Professor Morrow at morrow4@pdx.edu, and learn more about his work at www.dustinmorrow.com.