Concord Academy is honored to welcome Shamime Shaw as the 2020 Wilcox Fellow in Visual Arts. Over the course of the first semester, Shamime will be assisting Justin Bull in the Feature Film Production, after which she will assume the primary responsibility of the class.
Shamime is a native of Sacramento, California. From a young age, she knew that she wanted to work in some form of teaching, particularly at the high school and college level. Shamime subsequently matriculated to UCLA to pursue her undergraduate degree in cultural studies. During her time at UCLA, she balanced academia and film, opting to take multiple film theory, media studies, film history, photography, screenwriting, and documentary classes. After graduating from college, she made the choice to pursue her masters at Emerson College.
For Shamime, “In the world of social media marketing, any type of marketing, a film degree, to me, felt like it would be very beneficial.”
Her mentor and professor in grad school, Mark Fields, had worked at CA prior to his time at Emerson. Mark encouraged Shamime to apply for the Wilcox Fellowship at CA, a program run by CA to provide recent graduates with one year of teaching experience.
While at CA, Shamime will be learning teaching techniques at CA and class design by observing other classes in action. In the Feature Film Project, Shamime will take on the role of writer/director. She hopes to take as much feedback from her students as possible when developing the script. She wants to take things, “week by week and day by day,” letting the story adapt to the class structure.
“Hopefully, ideally, bits and pieces of our acting workshops will inform the characters that I develop dialogue for and scenarios for. So it’s really going to be this collaborative, amazing process that I’m extremely excited about because I’ve always thought that actors taking part in the script development would be really awesome to do (experience) and not, you know, just write the script, or find someone that you think would fit. I think it’s really cool to have the people/actors already and write a script that works with them. CA is one of the few schools that offers a feature-length production program, so I’m excited to go through the whole process and see what we can do”
Outside of CA, Shamime’s passions extend far beyond just film. Creative writing is one of many things that she enjoys doing, specifically writing Children’s books. “I have a great illustrator and I write children’s stories… it started out for fun, I never thought it would be anything that I’d want to get published. But while at Emerson, one of the creative writing professors there said, ‘you should really pursue some path for your stories.’ I had really just written them for my future children… But everyone who’s read them actually likes them so I thought let’s see what happens.” One of Shamime’s personal goals this year is to publish a short story that she has written.
“I might start doing a little more of that (writing) now that I have time again since I’ve graduated. The emphasis there though would be more in the entertainment industry, diversity, and representation.”
At CA, Shamime hopes to get involved in the Community and Equity Office in addition to her involvement in the film department. She also hopes to bring in new Q&A speakers and open discussions for the Women in Film Club on campus. She is excited to be able to grow in the community and join more activities.
And just in case anyone is wondering, her favorite movie is Gladiator (2000).