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Skidmore College

Skidmore Speaks:
Conversations about the First Amendment and the Meaning of Free Speech

November 5-8, 2018

Emily Rizzo '18 and Sanjna Selvarajan '21 


"And we talked" Film Viewing and Community Conversations

Thursday, November 8
9:30—10:30 a.m., 12:00—1:00 p.m., 3:00—4:00 p.m., 7:00—8:00 p.m.

Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum

Emily Rizzo '18
Emily Rizzo '18

Emily Rizzo '18 is an artist, activist and storyteller working at the interface of documentary film, audio documentary and socially engaged art. She graduated Skidmore College magna cum laude, as an English major and double minor in intergroup relations and media and film studies. Rizzo was a student fellow at the Skidmore Storytellers’ Institute and recently exhibited her work on place-based oral history and geolocative audio documentary projects at the Oral History Association Conference at Concordia University. She has worked under Skidmore’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative; Catherine Gund; Big World Cinema in Cape Town, South Africa; South Africa’s Sunday Times and New Jersey Reentry, a non-profit with the mission to remove barriers to employment for formally incarcerated individuals. Alongside the free speech documentary film, Rizzo continues work on her senior thesis, a documentary film surrounding abortion and stand-up comedy and a 360° documentary about Latino immigrants in Saratoga Springs in association with the Economic Opportunity Council of Saratoga County.

Sanjna Selvarajan
Sanjna Selvarajan '21

Sanjna Selvarajan '21 is an international affairs major and media and film studies minor with a passion for documentary film-making, photography and social justice. In May, she presented at a public photography exhibition about a silent march for Martin Luther King Jr. in Saratoga Springs. Alongside the free speech documentary, Selvarajan is currently producing a short documentary for the Tang as a student assistant at Skidmore's John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative . A storyteller at heart, Selvarajan is also in the process of filming her first independent documentary about child trafficking in orphanages across Nepal. She serves as the news section editor for Skidmore News and hopes someday to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent and to continue dabbling in the world of documentary film-making.