NYFA
Faculty Directory

Faculty Directory

Dafina Roberts

Dafina Roberts is an award-winning writer/director/producer with television development experience.

Recently, Dafina was a 2019 Ryan Murphy Half Initiative Directing Fellow. Previously, she created the digital series Giving Me Life (In The Land Of The Deadass). The series was released in 2019 via Comcast’s Xfinity, Gravitas Ventures and iOne Digital. Previously, the series won the AT&T Audience Award for Best Episodic at the 2018 Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival. It was also an Official Selection of the 2017 New York Television Festival, 2018 Cleveland International Film Festival, and 2018 Atlanta Out On Film Festival. In 2017, Dafina was a Kickstarter Creator-In-Residence while she was in production on Giving Me Life.

Prior to that, she worked as a Director of Development & Production at Nickelodeon, where she oversaw development and current series for scripted and unscripted projects. She also co-produced the urban coming-of-age feature film, Punching At The Sun (Official Selection of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival; Winner for Best Narrative at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.)

James Rowe

James first stepped onto a film set at 18 as a British Red Coat in Michael Mann’s epic adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, shooting outside his home town of Asheville, NC. That fall he entered UNC-Chapel Hill, where he would write and direct the jazz-inspired short film Sax Man. The short was purchased by PBS for their Southern Visions series and James was invited to join the American Film Institute as a Directing Fellow.
While at AFI, he optioned his first feature screenplay to Oliver Stone’s Illusion Entertainment. The resulting film, Blue Ridge Fall — starring Peter Facinelli (Twilight, Nurse Jackie) and Academy Award nominee Amy Irving (Traffic, Zero Hour) — was directed by James and released by HBO. It played the Los Angeles Film Festival, Austin Film Festival and Cine de Mar del Plata, Argentina, among others, and was given prominent placement on the Blockbuster Movie Awards.
“A taut drama,” proclaimed Film Threat, “extolling the bonds of friendship as well as the fragility and vulnerability of futures we wrongly assume are set in stone.”
James has since led filmmaking workshops for professionals around the world and continues to create in Los Angeles, as a screenwriter, director and educator.

Brad Sample

Brad Sample is an award-winning writer/director for film, television and the web. He holds an M.F.A. in Film Directing from U.C.L.A.’s School of Theater, Film and Television. His film credits include Stuck, a dark comedy short, and the Iraq War film Attention, which aired on the Showtime Network. Brad’s television work includes pilots ¡YO! Television, including the hip-hop dance battle show, Crunkiao, and the celebrity profile show, Mi Barrio. The highlight of his online work is Stand Up, a promotional video for the United Nations Millennium Campaign. Brad currently teaches directing at the New York Film Academy and is working on his next screenplay.

Michael Sandoval

MFA, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts; MFA, University of Michigan, Writing Program; BA, Brown University.

Films have appeared in Berlin Film Festival, Palm Springs, Slamdance, Toronto Short Film Festival, Margaret Meade Doc Festival, and more. Director of The Good Son (competition screening, Berlin); Ariana (Audience Award, San Luis Obispo Film Festival). Cinematographer/producing consultant for numerous film/TV productions, including feature documentary, Horizontes sin Dueño and “The Encounter” (Best Short, Las Palmas). Awarded Ang Lee Fellowship. Published fiction/non-fiction. Residency Grants include Ucross Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Eduardo Santa-Maria

Eduardo Santa–Maria, more commonly known as “Eddy Moon”, is a Caribbean-American Latino director & creative producer based in Miami, FL. His work is heavily inspired by the Hispanic multiculturalism of Miami, and the playfulness available to storytellers via the medium of cinema.

He holds a B.F.A. in Filmmaking and an M.S. in Global Communications.

His work has screened at festivals around the world, including The Miami Film Festival, Inside Out Toronto, HBO’s NY Latino, San Francisco Latino, Tokyo Short Shorts, New Orleans, amongst many more. Alongside screening his works at festivals, he has also helped program festivals for organizations like Slamdance.

A founding member of the White Elephant Group (WEGFilms), a Miami film collective known for its ability to tell local stories in unique ways, while also advocating for filmmaking in South Florida. In his free time, he mentors young artists in Miami through the WEGFilms non-profit, ASFI.

Boris Schaarschmidt

Boris Schaarschmidt is a director, producer, and writer with 15 well-recognized short films under his belt. Each of his films has won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. Boris holds a BFA in cinematography from the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany, and a MFA in directing from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He has been awarded several prestigious scholarships and awards, among them the German Academic Exchange Service Scholarship (DAAD), and the Pat Hitchcock O’Connell Scholarship Award.

Throughout his career, Boris has worked with well-accomplished and recognized professionals in the film industry, among them German director Romuald Karmaker and Quentin Tarantino, for whom Boris worked on the post-production of “Inglorious Bastards.” Following the success of his short film “Haleema,” Boris went to Iceland for a three-month artist residency and shot the experimental film “Eldur a Himni” about the Northern Lights.

Tony Schwartz

Tony began working in the film industry in 1986. He spent most of his career in production working as an assistant director and line producer in both feature films and network television. He has been a part of many critically acclaimed films and series, including One False Move, Freaks and Geeks, Firefly, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, and The Unit. Along the way, he has worked with luminaries such as Carl Reiner, David Mamet, Dan Petrie, Sr., Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Carl Franklin, and many others. Since leaving production in 2011, he has continued to develop original content with Kohler Schwartz Productions. He is currently working on a bio-pic about AIDS activist Marty Delaney.

Nan Siribunlue

Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Nan has decades of experience in the industry starting early in Hollywood as a PA and continuing on to various roles as a Producer’s Assistant in development, production coordination for commercials, and writer, director and producer on various Music Videos and content for the web.

She earned her BA in Cinema, Television, Arts at the California State University of Northridge, emphasizing in Screenwriting and Television Production. Following that she studied Improv and Comedy Sketch Writing at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade in Los Angeles. She was then accepted as a fellow at the American Film Institute Conservatory where she earned her MFA in Screenwriting.

Nan joined the NYFA team in the summer of 2019 as the Filmmaking Department Coordinator and started teaching Screenwriting that fall. She teaches BFA, MA, AFA and One Year classes for the Los Angeles Campus.

Nick Sivakumaran Senior Directing Instructor

MFA in Film Production, USC School of Cinema/TV; BA in Biology and Psychology, University of Rochester. Writer/Director of award-winning short film, “Diwali.” Screened at over 30 international film festivals, a recipient of a Director’s Guild of America Student Film Award and invited to the 2002 Cannes Film Festival as part of the Kodak Emerging Filmmaker Showcase. Also won commercial contests for clients, Chevrolet and Lifestyles Condoms and recently wrote a stage musical that had a six-week run in Hollywood.

Yoselin Solórzano

Yoselin Solórzano is an Ecuadorian filmmaker based in South Florida. She holds a Master’s Degree in Producing form New York Film Academy. Yoselin has more than 10 years of working in the Ecuadorian television industry where she has functioned as a Content Producer and as First Assistant Director for unscripted and scripted shows. After moving to Miami, she currently teaches several producing courses for the filmmaking department and filmcraft courses for the acting for film department of NYFA Miami.

Sue Jin Song

MFA in Acting, NYU/Tisch
A “Usual Suspect” at New York Theater Workshop, where she worked with Van Lier playwrights on developing new work. She has acted in theaters in New York City and regionally around the country, including world premieres written by Paula Vogel and Velina Hasu Houston. Film/TV credits include New Amsterdam, Generat+ion, Law & Order, Won’t Back Down, and Someone Like You. Sue Jin also wrote and acted in a one woman play Children of Medea, which was awarded “Best of DC Fringe” and was subsequently produced by Constellation Theatre. For the Screenwriting Department in LA, she teaches Acting as part of the Script To Screen course. In the Producing Department, she teaches Acting for Producers. In the Filmmaking Department, she teaches Acting for Filmmakers.

Samantha Soule

Samantha Soule is a filmmaker and actress. She directed Midday Black Midnight Blue, Birdwatching starring Amanda Seyfried, Taffeta, Shed, and Telling Time. As an actress, she can currently be seen in Outer Banks, Godless, Tales Of The City, Queen’s Gambit, and Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman on Netflix and City On A Hill for Showtime. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School.

Luisa Ibanez Suarez

Luisa Ibañez is a P.G.A Senior Content Film and TV Producer and member of The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in the US and LATAM media industry, including an overall of 1000 hours of content produced in different formats for diverse audiences and three International Emmy nominations for projects premiered on the US primetime. From this journey, she understands the expectations of diverse audiences in Latin America, Spain and Latinos in the US. Credits as Development Producer, Line Producer, and Supervising Producer on the successful Hispanic TV Series and telenovelas from NBC Telemundo, Univision, Televisa, and Movistar prove her high-quality deliveries in projects distributed in more than 100 countries and over 35 languages.

Shawn Sullivan

Shawn has been the post-production supervisor for the NYFA’s New York City and Los Angeles campuses, and was the director of the NYFA summer workshop at Walt Disney World. He has worked as an editor on short film, commercials, marketing videos, and feature films, with clients including Redken, Keller Williams, Exit Realty, Caldwell Banker, and Disney. In 2014, Disney presented Shawn with a Mousecar (Disney’s version of an Oscar) for 10 years of working with Disney Youth Program and NYFA. Shawn previously worked for Apple teaching film editing software. He is Final Cut Pro Certified by Apple. He is also an Avid Certified Instructor with the Media Composer film editing software. BA, Screenwriting: California State University Northridge

Andrea Swift Chair of Filmmaking

Throughout her experience, A cinematic storyteller with more than 20 years experience, Swift has served as executive producer and director of PBS’ Emmy-nominated documentary magazine series, In the Life. Her films have also been screened at the United Nations Earth Summit and at festivals worldwide, including Raindance Film Festival (Best of Festival Selection), Sundance’s Environmental Film Festival, and Berlin International Film Festival (Best Short Film, Panorama.) She has created content for AMC, History, WE, the NY Knicks, Madison Square Garden, and Clearview Cinemas; and has written for and directed top talent, including Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, Oscar nominees Laura Linney, Patricia Clarkson, and Lesley Gore, and Tony Award winners Alan Cumming, Harvey Fierstein, Denis O’Hare and Cherry Jones. Currently, Swift focuses on writing, story producing, and creative producing on a variety of documentary projects, including “The Crossing Borders Project,” a featured program of National Geographic’s education wing. MFA, Columbia University.

Graham Tallman

Graham is a writer/director whose films have been to over 100 festivals, have won numerous awards, and have gained distribution. As a writer, he has a script on the Black List, he has adapted a comic book for 20th Century Fox, and collaborated with companies such as Point Grey (Seth Rogen), Dark Castle (Joel Silver), and producers such as Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story) and Vertigo Entertainment (It, The Lego Movie). He wrote and directed the feature film Creeper, and was the second unit director for the film The Nevsky Prospect for Amazon Studios (which he also produced). As an assistant director, Graham worked on such films as The Virgin Suicides (Sophia Coppola), and Driven with Sylvester Stallone. He has also been a Story Analyst for Amazon Studios where he read and analyzed over 300 screenplays. He most recently pitched an adaptation of a novel to Netflix, and is currently writing his first pilot, as well as hosting Simulation Nation, a podcast that takes place in virtual reality.

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