Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.34st.com
Penn’s Cinema and Media Studies officially became an academic department in 2024. Today, its curriculum spans everything from film theory and world cinema to screenwriting, production, and the business of entertainment. But perhaps the most interesting part of that curriculum isn’t what students can study, but who’s teaching it.
You can learn about the history of animation from someone who helped shape it. You can study Hollywood talent representation with John Travolta and Travis Scott’s manager. You can write a screenplay under the guidance of a bestselling author, producer, and collaborator of Emmy winner John Leguizamo. And you can explore world cinema with a scholar whose research challenges what we think of as a global film industry.
That’s the kind of firsthand industry experience students can find in the CIMS department.
Consider Cinema and Media Studies professor Linda Simensky (C ’85), whose decades–long career in children’s entertainment has taken her from developing beloved animated television to shaping educational programming at PBS KIDS and even Duolingo. Along the way, she helped launch Nickelodeon series including Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, and Doug, before overseeing original animation at Cartoon Network, establishing Cartoon Network Studios, and serving as a production executive on shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Laboratory. Having spent decades shaping the medium, Simensky now teaches its history, examining the people, studios, and technological developments that transformed animation.
To many, animation history might just sound like a timeline of beloved cartoons, but in Simensky’s classroom, students explore collaboration between artists and executives, advances in animation technology, and the interconnected careers of industry professionals. “Animation’s not just made by one person. It’s often made by a team of people,” she explains.
Her courses—including “History of Disney Animation,” “American Animated Short,” and “History of Children’s TV”—trace how artists and executives moved between studios, founded new companies, and developed techniques that influenced the generations that followed. The central characters aren’t just the cartoons students grew up watching, but the people who brought them to life.
And Simensky’s own career illustrates how quickly the medium has changed. After decades in television, she moved to Duolingo, recognizing the growing intersection between storytelling and technology. “I’m not a programmer, I was never going to learn about it from that side of things,” she says. Instead, she brought her storytelling experiences to projects including the app’s Stories feature and experimental animated shorts for language learners. The skills Simensky learned making Saturday morning cartoons have now led her to an entirely different pursuit: teaching people Spanish.
But creating something audiences love is only half the challenge—someone also has to convince the industry to take a chance on it. That’s where Randi Michel (C ’91) comes in. A former agent and partner at talent agency William Morris Endeavor, Michel is now a manager, producer, and head of the New York office of talent management and production company Artists First. She brings 35 years of experience in talent representation to Penn as a lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies and Annenberg’s new Master of Communication and Media Industries program.
Her courses—“Artist Representation: Talent Agencies, Artist Management & The Manager–Producer’s Job”; “Hollywood: The Industry and Practice of Talent Representation”; and “Proseminar in Media and Communication Industries”—combine industry history, current entertainment news, and lessons from her own career.
Like Simensky, Michel uses the industry’s past to explain its present. But while Simensky teaches the history of the studios and executives behind childhood favorites, Michel asks students to make some of the same decisions facing entertainment professionals today.
In her courses, Michel’s students are asked to participate in the business, at least hypothetically. Assignments involve evaluating and signing potential talent, developing promotional materials, pitching and servicing clients, and creating sales tools like sizzle reels and trailers. Guest speakers from talent agencies, production companies, and entertainment law firms offer perspectives from across the industry, while field trips have taken students to WME’s New York office and Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters.
The idea is to give students a sense of what actually happens behind the scenes, including the parts that aren’t particularly glamorous.
Over the course of her career, Michel has learned a thing or two about persistence. She worked as an Emmy–winning producer on HBO’s Bessie, a biopic starring Queen Latifah that took more than 22 years to reach the screen. Two decades is a long time to wait for anything, let alone a single film; but Michel says that projects like Bessie only reinforce her love for the business.
Success in entertainment often means turning a “no” into a “yes,” even when it takes decades. It’s a lesson Michel emphasizes alongside communication, resilience, and the importance of choosing the right mentors, bosses, and clients.
While Michel teaches students how creative projects find their way through Hollywood, professor Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve (C ’88, W ’88) helps them confront an earlier challenge: actually making something worth selling. A novelist, screenwriter, producer, and former development executive, Van Cleve has taught at Penn since 2006. Her courses, including “Screenwriting Workshop,” “Advanced Screenwriting,” and “Art & Business of Film,” approach filmmaking as an intersection of artistic expression, practical craftsmanship, and commercial reality.
“Screenwriting and/or film production is an art. It’s a business. It’s a craft,” she says. “Everything that I did as a producer, a screenwriter, and a development executive, is part of all the courses [that I teach].” And her students aren’t just talking about how screenplays work or how films are put together—they’re actively creating them.
In Van Cleve’s screenwriting workshops, students bring their own scripts to class, where classmates read the dialogue aloud and act out the scenes (to the best of their ability while seated). Hearing fellow undergraduates deliver lines that previously existed only in your head can be a humbling experience, forcing writers to confront what works well, what definitely doesn’t, and what might need another draft.
For Simensky, collaboration explains how an industry evolved. For Van Cleve, it’s an essential part of learning how to bring any story to life in the first place.
Van Cleve estimates that 25–50% of her beginning screenwriting students finish an entire screenplay, despite it not being a course requirement. And in “Art & Business of Film,” students experience the entire filmmaking process firsthand, from developing and pitching an idea to navigating preproduction, shooting, and postproduction. By the end of the semester, the class has produced four short films, all of which are screened together. Van Cleve calls the final screening “magnificent.”
“I like to think that’s what undergraduate education’s about: trying something brand new, and then really having something to show for it,” she says.
Her emphasis on producing tangible work comes from her own experience in entertainment. While collaborating with John Leguizamo on his Broadway show Freak, Van Cleve found inspiration in his relentless commitment to creating. She recalls his respect for collaborators and willingness to work harder than practically anyone around him, qualities that she tried to emulate in her own career. “The point is to do the work, and then do the next piece of work, and the next, and the next,” she says.
Michel’s 23–year journey with Bessie suggests much the same thing: Whether writing a screenplay or fighting to get one produced, persistence is as much a part of filmmaking as creativity.
Van Cleve teaches students how to tell a compelling story. But what makes a story compelling—and which stories we consider worth telling—can depend on where we’re watching from. That’s a question professor Meta Mazaj brings to her classroom. Mazaj’s courses include “World Film History,” “American Independents,” and “Romantic Comedy,” among many others, and her research encompasses Balkan cinema, new European cinema, and the relationship between film and nationalism. For Mazaj, studying films offers something beyond professional preparation: an opportunity to reconsider how we understand the world and how we act in it.
“Today, we live in a global world, but there’s so much hatred, racism, and isolationism,” Mazaj says. “That is exactly counter to what, to me, world cinema is all about, which is about openness to the other—curiosity about something else, willingness to step outside of your own shoes.” Rather than treating cinema as a collection of canonical films to admire, Mazaj encourages students to question how movies reflect, reinforce, and challenge the societies that produce them.
Take romantic comedies. Love and relationships might seem universal, but Mazaj argues that the genre does considerably more than entertain audiences with meet–cutes and happy endings. Rom–coms communicate cultural expectations about marriages, relationships, and what falling in love is supposed to look like. They can reinforce prevailing social norms or challenge them, making even the most familiar genre a window into the values of a particular time and place.
And sometimes, the most important question isn’t what a movie says, but whether audiences ever get the chance to see it. While researching for her book World Cinema: A Critical Introduction, Mazaj encountered a striking contradiction: Some of the world’s largest film industries, producing enormous quantities of movies for substantial domestic audiences, remain underrepresented in what American audiences recognize as world cinema.
“In the U.S., we see less than 1% of what is being made and distributed globally,” she says.
In a sense, Mazaj examines the other side of the history Simensky teaches. While Simensky gives the backstories behind household names, Mazaj considers the films that never achieved that kind of recognition—not necessarily because they lacked quality or an audience, but because American audiences rarely had the chance to see them.
For Mazaj, that disparity raises questions about access, cultural influence, and the politics of visibility. Her courses ask students not only to watch such unfamiliar films, but to consider the forces determining which films they have the opportunity to watch in the first place.
Mazaj hopes the experience will “reworld [a student’s] world,” changing how students perceive their own surroundings. Her advice for students hoping to broaden their cinematic horizons is refreshingly straightforward: “Rather than going to something that is expected and that everybody’s talking about, watch something that is completely unfamiliar to you, and see what happens.”
A student might enter the CIMS department wanting to write the next great screenplay, understand the economics of Hollywood, or discover films they would never otherwise encounter. Cinema and Media Studies offers opportunities to pursue all three, taught by people whose careers have taken them far beyond the classroom.
Whether those students eventually find themselves in a writers’ room, a talent agency, or an entirely different industry, they’ll leave with a better understanding of how stories are created, how they reach audiences, and why they matter. For once, “I know someone in Hollywood” might mean your professor.
