Wendy Bednarz
Associate Arts Professor of Arts and New Media
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Stephens College MFA Film, New York University;
Research Areas: filmmaking, photography, documentary
Wendy Bednarz is a filmmaker and a photographer whose professional work engages multicultural narratives and has screened at venues worldwide including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival. Her work has garnered awards such as the Cine Golden Eagle, the Independent Film Award, and the Sundance Winfemme. She taught film production at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, Undergraduate Film Program and NYU Tisch Asia, Graduate Film Program, before joining the faculty at NYUAD. She teaches Intermediate Film, Capstone Seminar, Capstone Projects and more recently Human Value – a course that challenges students to deconstruct the historical definition of ‘human value’ across a diversity of cultures through creating still and moving images.
Among other projects, she is currently completing post-production (producer/director) on feature documentary ‘Burning Money’ that is shot in Singapore’s Chinese community and explores the thousand years plus tradition of burning paper money and facsimiles of everyday objects in order to deliver a happy life in the hereafter. She is also developing the narrative feature project, ‘Yellow Bus Asfar,’ loosely based on the true story of a four-year-old Indian girl who fell asleep on an Abu Dhabi school bus and suffocated in the blistering heat. Germinating from a lecture she gave on ‘film adaption,’ ‘Yellow Bus Asfar’ encapsulates Wendy’s greatest passions by bridging her artistic ambitions, the classroom, and local communities.