Philip Alvy – Division Director
Philip (he/him) is an award-winning filmmaker and arts educator. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago, he moved to Los Angeles and worked in the film industry before pivoting to education. In 2017, Philip lived in Kenya and developed a curriculum for an organization providing opportunities for youth to tell their stories through filmmaking. He completed his MFA focused on media education at Emerson College in 2020. Soon after, Philip founded Arts Integrated, a nonprofit aiming to create tools to inspire art-based learning for educators. Philip has served on the industry advisory board for the National Film Festival for Talented Youth and, in 2023, completed the Teacher Institute fellowship at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Ella Harmon – Director of Production
Ella Harmon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator with background in fashion and music videos. Having worked as a Director, Cinematographer, Editor, Colorist, Producer, and Production Coordinator, Ella has a 360 understanding of the production process. Ella’s work has been featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, Latina Magazine, and Movie Maker Magazine and has been screened at festivals worldwide. Ella has an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University with a Certificate in Critical Theory. In 2023, Ella taught Production, Expanded Documentary Film, and Color Correction at NHSI. This year, Ella is excited to return as the Director of Production
Carmen Hines Gardner – Residence Hall Director
Carmen Gardner is a Passion Strategist who specializes in helping individuals and organizations align their work with what drives them. She is an educator and creative leader with deep roots in Northwestern University’s academic and residential life community. She brings a dynamic blend of experience to her role as Residence Hall Director for NHSI’s Film Division, having supported pre-college learners through Northwestern’s College Prep Program and serving as a Teaching Assistant for courses in communication and organizational theory at Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies. Carmen is also the founder of Momentum Management Group, where she helps creatives and organizations lead with clarity, resilience, and purpose. Her clients include Grammy-winning artists, city agencies, and mission-driven startups. She currently serves as Co-Director of Northwestern’s Alumni Admissions Council and is the Executive Director of the award-winning short film Long Ride Home. Carmen holds a master’s degree from Harvard University, where she served as Student Association President, and a bachelor’s from Northwestern University. She is also the founder of Bark Manor, a boutique breeding and boarding company specializing in Goldendoodles and Lhasa Poos. She resides on the South Side of Chicago with her husband—an actor, professor, and President of SAG-AFTRA (Midwest)—their three dogs Chai, Copper, and Cora, and a pack of pups that keep life lively!
Monica Thiele – Associate Director
Monica is a high school teacher with experience in teaching English, graphic design, and visual media. She is passionate about empowering students to take creative risks in their work and to see their art and self-expression as a tool for liberation. Monica serves on the teacher advisory council for Arts Integrated, an arts education non-profit, and is a teaching fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Robin Woitesek – Assistant to the Directors
Robin Woitesek, as a lifelong lover of film, has a passion for not only analyzing film, but inspiring others to both create and appreciate the art in the visual medium. This has led Robin to pursue her lifelong passion academically in which she conducted a year-long senior capstone project entitled, “Evil, Skanky, and Kinda Gay”: Queer Theory, Feminist Television Criticism, & “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” where she analyzed the cult television show through applying feminist television criticism and queer theory. Most recently, she has also been exploring the non-profit sector of this passion through working at Chicago Filmmakers as their Program Coordinator, where she was in charge of organizing upcoming film festivals, education courses, running screenings, and handling film projection. Robin began working with NHSI as a Residential and Faculty Assistant in 2023 and is excited to be coming back again this summer as the Assistant Residence Hall Director with the Film and Video Division.
Kate Compton – Acting on Camera Faculty
Kate Compton is an Actor, Comedian, Teaching Artist, and Storyteller who is currently based in Chicago and LA. She is also an Adjunct Professor who teaches Acting at Harper College. Kate holds an MFA in Acting from Northwestern University and a BFA in Theatre from Michigan State University. She is also a graduate of the Conservatory Program at The Second City Hollywood. (So sometimes she’s funny). Kate has worked in national commercials, film, television, and in the sketch/improv community in Los Angeles for the last two decades. She is also a member of the creative collective, Tuesday Night Films, a group that creates, produces, and films digital sketches and short films. As an educator, she strives to show her students how to experience the world through exploration, experimentation, and play while helping them explore who they are and all of the possibilities that inhabit the human condition. Kate is thrilled to be joining NHSI for the first time this summer!
Juli del Prete – Directing Faculty
Juli Del Prete is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer. She is the co-creator, -writer, and -star of The Right Swipe, an intersectional feminist romantic comedy web series (OTV | Open Television). Most recently, she co-produced the short films Whole + Six Feet Apart by Isaac Gómez and Monty Cole and wrapped post-production for her directorial debut short film, Caroline. She was the assistant director for the world premiere of Tracy Letts’s Linda Vista (Broadway, Steppenwolf, Mark Taper Forum). Juli’s writing has been recognized by the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Austin Film Festival, and O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. In her free time, you can find her sipping a giant Dunkin’ iced coffee while walking her lab/pit mix, Buffy.
Greta Díaz Moreau – Directing Faculty
Greta Díaz Moreau is a Spanish screenwriter/director and visual artist based in New York, known for her film and scenographic portrait work. As a director, she shows an evident passion for expressionist narratives, female perceptions of shame and desire in castrating environments, and exhilarating humor that punches you in the gut. During the pandemic in 2020, Greta started exploring the world of scenographic portraiture, leading the narrative for the exhibition “La Muda,” a project that spanned two years and was finally presented on February 27, 2021, at the Lo Pati Art Center. She is currently finishing her Directing MFA at Columbia University in New York, where she received the Sarah Jones Grant Award for her next project, ‘Loquita por ti,’ which will be filmed next fall in her hometown, Simancas, Spain.
Ian Kelly – Production Faculty
Ian Kelly is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who uses animation as means to enliven stories of personal and historical memory. Ian’s films have played at numerous film festivals across the country, including the Chicago International Film Festival, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Ian has edited films about dinosaurs for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and films on Oprah for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ian was the Assistant Editor on the short film, The Neighbors’ Window, winner of the 2020 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Ian has an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University.
Fiona Obertinca – Screenwriting Faculty
Fiona Obertinca is a Swedish/Albanian screenwriter and director with fourteen independent narrative and documentary short films under her belt, some of which have premiered at film festivals in Sweden, UK and U.S. Her very first short film Shpëtimi, which depicts her family’s refuge from the war in Kosovo won the Bronze prize at the popular Pixel Short Film Festival in 2012. Prior to graduating from the prestigious American Film Institute Conservatory as a Directing Fellow, Fiona worked in development in Hollywood on shows such as MAX’s Made For Love and BBC’s Ridley Road. Growing up as a refugee in Sweden as the daughter of a single mother of four, she saw first-hand how incredibly unjust the world can be to society’s most marginalized people. She hopes to tell stories for and about complicated, resilient women who must overcome the odds to find empowerment and self-actualization (laughs and tears guaranteed.)
Nathan Shelton – Acting on Camera Faculty
Nathan Shelton (SAG/AFTRA, AEA) is an award-winning actor, writer, director, & SFX makeup artist based in Chicago, IL. Nathan has worked regularly as a stage, screen, & voice actor for over thirty years, and can be seen in feature films such as Above Ground (featured on Showtime), Broken Faith, Aging Predators, and MEAD (starring Robert Picardo & Patton Oswalt). On the small screen, he’s been seen in the internationally acclaimed web series, Shadow Bound, the ATAS Award-winning web series, EPILOGUE, multiple national commercials/industrials, as well as hosting the 4th season of the Mid America EMMY Award-winning television program, Show-Me Chefs. Aside from performing, Nathan’s Special Effects work can be seen in films such as the Academy Award-nominated, Winters Bone (starring Jennifer Lawrence), Above Ground, MEAD, PMS Cop & The Sky Has Fallen. With his production company, ARCANE, he has produced numerous stage, screen, & audio productions (including the IAWTV-nominated, SHADOW BOUND, and the horror anthology audio-drama series, The Frightmare Theatre Podcast). Nathan loves working with passionate and driven young artists and has worked with NHSI since 2014, teaching evening masterclass workshops in special effects makeup design/application. This year, he is thrilled to join the other outstanding artists in the NHSI faculty, teaching Acting for the Camera!
Katla Solnes – Screenwriting Faculty
Katla Sólnes is a wry and aesthetically driven writer-director represented by True North Talent with a diversified background in filmmaking. Preceding her master’s, she spent five years as a full-time editor and scriptwriter at a competitive ad agency in Iceland. She just finished her last semester at Columbia’s illustrious MFA film program and recently won Columbia’s Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Competition with her feature, which is currently in development with funding from the Icelandic Film Fund, titled ‘Eruption’. She’s currently in post-production of her thesis short ‘Embla’ a feminist fable fully supported by The Indian Paintbrush Fund. Her recent shorts, ‘Make a Wish, Benóný!’ starring A24’s Lamb’s Björn Hlynur won awards at RIFF and DC Fest and is currently on its festival circuit and the even more recent film, a textured environmental film about the rising sea levels, ‘Whim Rules the Child, Weather the Field’ starring Edda Björgvins and Jörundur Ragnarsson (fully funded by The Icelandic Film Fund) has just entered its festival circuit and is set to premiere at the Academy-qualifying SSFF festival in Tokyo.
Lulu Tian – Production Faculty
Luyao (Lulu) Tian is a filmmaker originally from Boston and currently based in Chicago. She’s interested in longitudinal projects about people’s “everyday” lives, and how memory manifests in mundane moments. Lulu completed her MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University in 2024. Her short thesis film explores how memory creates a new sense of time and space for her family as they experience loss and reconnection across China and America. Currently, Lulu is working with various Chicago AAPI communities, doing videography for a dance performance series, and collecting oral histories for an independent project. Lulu also holds a Bachelor of Science from MIT in neuroscience and computer science and is interested in how scientific and artistic thinking overlap and inform each other.
Jiaxin Wei – Production Faculty
Jiaxin Wei is a documentary filmmaker and educator originally from China. Her work mainly concentrates on family stories, personal memories, and voices of marginalized individuals seeking to be heard. Drawing from her experiences learning multiple languages and dialects, her art practice bridges cultural intersections and promotes diverse encounters. In addition, she gained professional experience in teaching, freelance cinematography, and editing. She gained her MFA degree in Documentary Media program at Northwestern University. Her work has been played in Film Diary NYC, CineYouth Film Festival, the Prague Film Award, and other independent film festivals. In her free time, she loves taking photos, dancing, and spending time with her dog Cuddle.
Film & Video Division – Application Information and Deadlines – Tuition and Fees – Scholarships and Financial Aid