Dr Leo Berkeley

Position

Associate Dean (MJSM)

School /
Work Unit

Media and Communication

Contact Details

+(61 3) 9925 3014

leo.berkeley@rmit.edu.au

Location

Building: 9
Level: 4
Room: 59

City Campus

College/Portfolio

Design & Social Context

 

Leo Berkeley

Key activities

Leo has academic management responsibility for the Media, Journalism and Music Industry disciplines within the School of Media and Communication, as well as the Film and TV stream in the Master of Creative Media and the Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours) program. He is a member of the School’s Executive and Learning and Teaching Committees.

Qualifications

PhD, RMIT University, 2012

Teaching

In recent years Leo has taught COMM2249 TV2, which is a second year course on documentary production, COMM2341 Community Media and the third year Media courses Production Project 1 and 2. In 2010-11, he taught a new elective called Screen Production Project, which is available for students from a wide range of disciplines and levels to come together to work on the production of a series for community television

Industry experience

Films Leo has made - as a writer, director and editor – include "Summer Was A Blur" (1989 / 32 mins / 16mm) and "Holidays On The River Yarra" (1991 / 90 mins / 35mm). “Holidays” was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival that year. It also screened at Tokyo, Chicago and numerous other international film festivals. It got theatrical releases in Australia and has screened on the Nine Network in this country and Channel 4 in the U.K. It was included in retrospectives of Australian cinema that were held at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris (1991) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1995). More recently, it was screened on SBS Television as David Stratton's Movie of the Week (2003) and Foxtel (2004). Leo has also made educational videos ("Do Care", "A Career In Social Work"), worked on television news (GTV 9 Melbourne, as a camera assistant and sound recordist), produced films for other people ("Park Street", directed by Nick Kavalieratos) & directed a series of the satirical puppet show "Rubbery Figures". Since he made "Holidays On The River Yarra" in 1991, he has written three further feature film scripts: "Toxic Love", "Too Hot To Hold" & "Love Parts". Recent projects include:

  • “Stargazers”, a 300 minute fully improvised video program (screened at the 2005 Melbourne Underground Film Festival);
  • “Too Close For Comfort”, a pilot for a TV comedy series made with both recent graduates and current students at RMIT;
  • “Ending With Andre”, a machinima drama that was an official selection at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival in New York; and
  • “How To Change The World” (2008), an improvised micro-budget 75 minute film drama.

A profile of his work as a filmmaker can be found at: www.innersense.com.au/mif/berkeley.html

An in-depth interview with Leo conducted by Jake Wilson was published in issue 56 of the online journal Senses of Cinema.

Community and industry connections

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