Contact Info
Rory Kelly
Assistant Professor
Filmmaker Rory Kelly is an assistant professor in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. His first feature, MGM/UA’s Sleep With Me, premiered as an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard in 1994 and received a gala screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. At the Los Angeles Film Festival in 1998, Kelly received the Audience Award as best director for his second feature, Some Girl. His most recent short film, The Women, premiered in 2006 at the Long Island Film Festival. Also that year, he was the co-executive producer of mtvU’s Sucks Less With Kevin Smith. As a 2009-10 Film Independent Screenwriting Fellow, Kelly co-wrote The End of Something with a former student, Tim McCarthy. Their project was also accepted to IFP’s prestigious No Borders International Co-Production Market.
As a researcher, Kelly is focused on exploring the links between narrative and formal elements in the cinema and our evolved psychology. Since 2011, he has been engaged in a funded interdisciplinary research project that seeks to introduce empirical and formal techniques from the study of linguistic discourse to the study of visual narrative, film in particular. He was also named a collaborator on an NSF Grant for the period 2013-2015. This project sought to generate complimentary art, science and public outreach films pertaining to geophysical fluid dynamics.
Kelly is a member of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, the University Film and Video Association, and Film Independent. In 2010, he received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching
