By Inés Vogelfang It’s been about 7 months since Deanna passed away. [The article was written earlier this spring – editor] This event found me, luckily, surrounded by my partner and close friends, since I was filming with them in upstate New York for the weekend. It was a Sunday morning, my friends and I had woken up at 5 AM to shoot at a waterfall near the house where we were staying. When we got back to the house, the news about Deanna’s passing had made its way up to Hudson, NY. Olivia was with me; she is my good friend and also a former student of Deanna’s. I…

By Kristin Sztyk “Fab!” is what Deanna would enthusiastically exclaim whenever I told her good news. Her open arms and sincere joy at the successes of her students confirmed and encouraged each small step in our journey to become documentary filmmakers. That “Fab!” wasn’t just reserved for good news. She audibly yelped it when she saw a cut or shot she loved in an edit. In that one-syllable shortening of the word “fabulous” was Deanna’s love of documentary film and education. She had a deep passion for films that were non-predictable in their form and content. She spent hours with her students dissecting the great works of documentary film to…

By Joy Ernanny My name is Joy Ernanny, and I am from Rio de Janeiro. I am a news program and documentary producer at GloboNews, a 24-hour news cable channel in Brazil. I attended The New School, Doc Studies program, from 2017 to 2018. The program made me want to transition from TV to the big screen, and work exclusively with independent documentaries one day. Deanna was the Doc Studies program director, and I was both her student and teaching assistant. During the spring semester, she invited me to TA for one of her master level classes, “Directing Documentaries.” We had a deep connection from day one – probably because…

By Matthew Slutsky Deanna Kamiel was hardwired to observe and derive meaning from things that most of us never even see. One of the most important moments of my time studying with Deanna came during a Saturday session we had scheduled to review rough cut number eighteen of my short film. Being the nervous wreck that I was during this time, I had preselected a number of scenes I wanted to show her and had formulated a plan in my head for how our time together would go. When we sat down in the darkened computer lab, I immediately started scrubbing through material – hoping to jump to the parts…

By Casey O’Connell On September 21, 2018, Mitch Kamiel brought together New School students, faculty and family for a thoughtful tribute to his older sister, Deanna. I was in attendance that somber evening in the auditorium at Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall. My understanding of the person Deanna Kamiel was had been almost entirely informed by the others in the room as they shared such touching memories, tender anecdotes. Their remarks moved me in such a way that left me feeling robbed of the opportunity to have known her on a more personal level. I let myself become immersed in the energy of the room that night, from the heaviness of…

By Jem Cohen In the last years of her life, Deanna had hopes to make a film of her own relating to newsstands. I don’t know many details or how far she got with the project. I do know that she sensed in these humble establishments an idea and an ideal:  the newsstand as a gathering of voices, an always-changing station from which varied points of view might tumble forth. In other words, she saw this unassuming street architecture as an outpost of democratic plurality. Her interest was also born out of concerns regarding the diminishment of journalism in general and print in particular. As bastions of “street life,” newsstands…

By Casey O’Connell The Lace Ghetto was co-authored by Maxine Nunes and Deanna White and published in 1972. Born out of the research for an acclaimed television series, “Women Now,” that the two  developed at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, this book traces the historical and existential conditions of inequality and oppression that were fueling the women’s movement. The ten chapters cover topics such as “Socialization,” “Fashion,” “Sexuality,” “Marriage,” “Motherhood,” “Consciousness Raising” and more. Drawing on extensive interviews with both women and men, the book devotes substantial space to these voices, contradictions and all. Interspersed throughout are quotations from feminist texts, but also images from comic strips, advertised beauty products, newspaper…

By Sumita S. Chakravarty Although Deanna Kamiel is best known for her documentary work in film and her early television journalism, my own recollections are most vivid in our conversations about writing and the power of words and ideas. Indeed, one of her long-running courses was named “Television and Ideas.” Among her favorite writers was the British-born South Asian, Hanif Kureishi, to whose work she consistently returned, and to whose films she directed her most inspired writing. Because this aspect of her career is less familiar to our readers, I will focus on her essay in a book on Kureishi which itself was the result of a conference in London…