There's a new Ant in town, folks. And her name is Colleen Jankovic.

Colleen recently joined us from Bloomington, Indiana to attend the University of Pittsburgh as a Predoctoral Fellow in the School of Arts & Sciences. I believe she's officially in the Cultural Studies program, but I'm bettin' that Pitt's renowned Film Studies program had a role in attracting her.

Colleen has the unusual distinction of being the first Dreaming Ant employee to be headhunted from afar. We have John Trenz, a loyal Dreaming Ant member and former Crazy Mocha Coffee employee, to thank for this fortunate matchmaking. John, a Pitt Film Studies doctoral student, boasted of Colleen after playing host to her during her exploratory visit to the university. His enthusiasm was so infectious that I decided to do a little Google-search on Miss J. Lo and behold! This young woman had amassed an impressive track record in her short life, and was clearly a film enthusiast.

In addition to earning her undergraduate degree in Communications & Culture from Indiana University Bloomington, Colleen managed The Cinemat  - Bloomington's independent video-rental store with "a movie complex" (a 49-seat screening room, that is). She also co-founded Cinephile, a non-profit organization whose mission is to demystify filmmaking and thus make it more accessible. Three valuable resources that Colleen helped establish while with the organization are the Cinephile Filmmakers' Forum (connecting filmmakers with one another), the Film Grant Project (awarding grants to help finance local films) and the Cinephile Festival of Independent Film and Video (providing a venue to give local filmmakers exposure within the community). Working toward a self-sustaining existence, the group also created the weekly Atomic Age Cinema event held at The Cinemat where they feature vintage and obscure horror and sci-fi films.

Impressed yet? I was.

So much so, that even though I had never met Colleen, and despite the fact that we didn't have any jobs available at the time, I offered her a future position.

Colleen is going to be your new Saturday afternoon (12:00-6:00PM) Guide at Dreaming Ant, so please welcome her and demonstrate just how wrong Sienna Miller was about our beautiful city! Very knowledgeable about film, I'm guessing Colleen would fancy a good discussion about world cinema's representation of Israeli-Palestinian relations, how culture-jamming and experimental cinema might be used to criticize the likes of Netflix and Blockbuster, or simply to chat about her favorite recent movies. I know she's also eager to immerse herself in Pittsburgh's talented pool of film, video and media aficionados as soon as she's settled at school, so do yourself a favor and introduce yourself.

Welcome, Colleen!

dB