Behind the Camera with Tommy Britt

You might be excited to learn that Tommy Britt (E&H Class of 2002) recently interviewed Yoko Ono for a major pop culture magazine.

But that’s just the beginning of an impressive list of projects.

Tommy is the only full-time faculty member in the Film and Video Studies Program at George Mason University, and was the first faculty member hired when the program was initiated. This fledgling program has grown into 150 film and video majors, so Tommy stays pretty busy with his “day job.”

But he still finds time for a creative outlet. He recently completed a directing role on a documentary called “Lost in Winesburg” that examines the legacy of Sherwood Anderson’s book, Winesburg, Ohio.

He’s also been worked for filmmaker Ondi Timoner, the only person to ever win the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival twice. He most recently worked with her on a project called Join Us.

Currently he’s working on a short film about drag racing, and he served as the camera operator and editor for a longer film about German artists and the anniversary of the German reunification. He has also directed a movie that premiered at the Athens International Film Festival.
And in his spare time, he writes.

“Writing has been another activity that I have been able to balance with my teaching, and writing is actually easier to accomplish than filmmaking because I am able to do that whenever and wherever without depending on all the factors involved in putting a production together,” Tommy said.

Case in point, some of the filming he was scheduled to do for the piece on the German artists was cancelled because of the flights grounded recently by volcanic ash. His essays have been printed in Bright Lights Film Journal, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, and the Cinephile: The University of British Columbia’s Film Journal. He is also scheduled to have chapters published in two books: Beyond the Plantation: Southern Identifies in Contemporary Film and Habitus of the Hood.

And, just in case he doesn’t seem busy enough, he is also a staff writer for PopMatters an “international magazine of cultural criticism.” The publication has more than 1.2 million monthly readers, and Tommy writes about music and film and gets to interview fascinating people like Yoko Ono.

We expect that very soon, PopMatters will be interviewing Tommy.