When we started our collaboration, Ioana was a post-doctoral fellow in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a native of Romania who speaks four languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish), Ioana is very gifted both as a filmmaker and as a theorist, and brings a transdisciplinary perspective and global dimension to all of her projects., Even more remarkable, she combines these strengths with a solid background in biochemistry and neuroscience, a combination that is extremely rare in our field. Not only did she receive a Licentiate degree (equivalent to an MS degree) in biology (with a specialty in biochemistry) at the University of Bucharest in 1994, but she also served as a teaching assistant in biology courses at USC in 2003/04 and conducted biology labs for high school students in the broader USC community. This transdisciplinary mix was valuable for her work on our Interacting with Autism video-based website, where she served as Production Manager. Ioana not only has kept up with the latest research developments in biology but also used this unique combination as the theoretical grounding for a pioneering book on editing, titled Intimate beyond Words. She presently has a tenure-track position at Middlebury College., where she teaches both production and media studies.
