Faculty Bio
 | Barbara SchockDepartment of Graduate Film |
Biography
Barbara Schock is an independent filmmaker/director raised in South Dakota. She attended the University of California at San Diego with a major in literature and a minor in visual arts. Her foremost influence was the painter/film critic Manny Farber who taught a legendary film class at UCSD called “A Hard Look at the Movies.”Barbara moved to Los Angeles and produced two independent features: California Without End and From Hollywood to Deadwood (Island Pictures). She sold both of these films at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York. Barbara has worked as an assistant for producers and directors on several features, including assisting David Fincher on location in London on Alien 3 and producer Michael Nozik on Michael Apted’s Thunderheart. She ran a screenplay development and production company in Manhattan for the director Joan Micklin Silver.
In 1995, Barbara attended the American Film Institute, where she directed several successful short pieces, including her thesis film, My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York written by Rex Pickett (Sideways), for which she won the 2000 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, the Director’s Guild of America Ida Lupino Award, and the Kodak Award for Excellence in Student Filmmaking, among many other awards.
Barbara is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Executive Committee for the Academy’s Short Film and Feature Animation Branch. Her Filmmaker magazine article on script development, ‘The Write Stuff,” was used as the centerpiece for a Writer’s Guild Foundation Seminar in 1999. Barbara recently taught film graduate studies at Chapman University where she oversaw the development and production of many short films. This summer she will be teaching a Short Film workshop at the Maine International Film and Video Workshops. She lives in Hollywood where she is raising her daughter and continuing to write and develop her own projects.
