Director of Film and Media Studies; Art History Professor – Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Appointed a scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012, Scott MacDonald is the author of 17 books, including A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (5 volumes), and has conducted numerous essays and interviews. His most recent books are American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (essays) and Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (interviews). He has curated and presented film events for the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Film Archive, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and other venues. MacDonald received his doctorate from the University of Florida. One of MacDonald’s current projects is “Flaherty Stories,” a blog he is co-authoring with Professor Patricia R. Zimmermann at Ithaca College. “Flaherty Stories” is the continuation of his recent book, “The Flahertys: Decades in the Indie Film Cause (Indiana University Press, 2017) For more than 60 years, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, held annually at the Colgate University has hosted filmmakers, academics, curators and writers for an intensive and often volatile week focused on cutting edge documentary filmmaking.