English English Adjunct Faculty
Office: Reynolds Hall 106
Email: wjackson@westmont.edu
Fall 2023 Office Hours: By appointment
A native of Atlanta, Wendy Eley Jackson has over 25 years of experience in film and television. She received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Georgia. Professor Jackson is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, where she teaches screenwriting. She serves as the CEO of Auburn Avenue Films, a production company specializing in entertainment that brings social awareness and engages audiences to participate in social change.
Her experience in the media industry ranges from working in made-for-television movies for TriStar/Columbia Pictures Television, to advertising and marketing with Turner Entertainment Networks, to developing television pilots for major networks. She recently received the Producers Guild of America mark for her work on the feature-length documentary Maynard, which explores the life and legacy of Atlanta’s first black mayor. Currently, she is the Executive Producer of the documentary Welcome To Pine Lake and is in post-production for her latest documentaries, Her Inescapable Brave Mission and Counting The Ballots. In addition, she serves as a board member for Women in Film Atlanta, the Atlanta Film Society, the BronzeLens Film Festival, and the National Association for Television Arts and Sciences.
Office: Reynolds Hall 105
Email: flanda@westmont.edu
Phone: (805) 565-7084
Fall 2023 Office Hours: Tuesdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM and Thursdays from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Felicity Landa is a writer, editor, and screenwriter in Santa Barbara, CA. She earned a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing, Literature, and Italian Studies from California State University Long Beach in 2013, where she was awarded the Isabelle McCaffrey Horn Scholarship for her fiction. She holds an MFA in Fiction from University of California Riverside Palm Desert, where she also studied Screenwriting. Felicity has served as an editor for the online Literary Magazines Literary Mama, and The Coachella Review. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Pithead Chapel, Raising Mothers, Capulet Mag, The Sunlight Press and elsewhere. She was selected in 2022 as a mentee for Latinx in Publishing's Mentorship program. As a Screenwriter Felicity works freelance, writing adaptations for the production company Voyage Media. She was recognized at the 2021 Austin Film Festival as a Semifinalist for her Original Drama Teleplay, and the Rooster Teeth BIPOC Fellowship.
Office: Deane Hall 205
Email: rminor@westmont.edu
Phone: (805) 565-6155
Fall 2023 Office Hours: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM (and by appointment)
Ryan Minor is an Africanist with a specialization in twentieth century West African culture (specifically Anglophone countries like Ghana and Nigeria). Since 2016 Dr. Minor has taught upper and lower division courses on African history and literature. When teaching African literature courses, he focuses on the ways that authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from the continent use fiction to recount, wrestle with, and challenge popular understandings of their cultures. He is particularly committed in using this creative content to debunking the “Western” myth of Africa as the “dark continent” – the longstanding narrative that Africa is a place without meaningful cultural or social achievements prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Dr. Minor has several years of experience teaching composition courses. He loves introducing students to concepts like genre awareness, rhetorical analysis, imagined audiences, discourse communities and how to read like a writer. Dr. Minor believes that teaching these concepts provides students with a framework to improve their writing, and a set of tools to help them compose the narrative of their academic and social lives at Westmont and beyond.
Currently, Dr. Minor is interested in analyzing graphic novels and animated films that fictionalize major events of the twentieth century (books like Maus and Persepolis, and films like Grave of the Fireflies). Over the last five years, he has developed a pedagogy for using these types of sources, which combine both written and visual rhetoric, as core teaching materials for college English and history courses. In 2021 he saw these efforts come to fruition in a course he designed and taught at UCSB titled Historical Fiction. He is also in the early stages of developing his own fictional graphic novel based on the lives of African soldiers, who fought for the British in Burma (Myanmar) during World War II.
Office: Reynolds Hall 105
Email: dsmall@westmont.edu
Phone: (805) 565-7084
Office Hours: By appointment
Diana Lynn Small writes, acts, and directs for the stage. Diana also has training as a hospital chaplain and historic home curator. Diana earned her MFA in playwriting from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin and an MDiv from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (PC-USA). Diana is a Company Member of Salvage Vanguard Theater (SVT) in Austin, TX and served as an Interim Artistic Director in 2017-2019. In the 18/19 SVT season, Diana directed the world premiere of Tryouts by Adara Meyers and the regional premiere of Anne Carson's Antigonick, which earned 6 Austin Critics Table Award nominations. Diana's new play House Play was developed at Berkeley Rep's The Ground Floor in 2017 and is performed in homes. Mad & a Goat has toured to seven cities since it was developed in 2013. Her play Good Day was selected for the 2015 Great Plains Conference PlayLabs, Kitchen Dog Theatre’s New Works Festival and was a finalist for the 2015 Play Penn Conference. Diana has worked with Paper Chairs Theatre company in Austin having directed Elizabeth Doss's play Mast and performing/dramaturging Doss's plays Poor Herman, Catalina and The Divine Narcissus. Paper Chairs shared the world-premiere of Diana's play Hot Belly with The Syndicate in NYC (The Tank).