Frank Sanna, MFA

As a teacher, my primary goal is to help students discover and better understand their own voice — not as a fixed identity, but as a unique and valid perspective in dialogue with the world.
 
My creative work unfolds across traditional and hybrid forms of documentary and fiction filmmaking. Through these forms, I explore questions of belonging, identity, and meaning, often grounded in lived experience and long-term observation. I’m especially attentive to how meaning is felt, constructed, and shared.
 
Over time, this inquiry has brought me into dialogue with thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Ernesto Grassi, Michael Polanyi, William H. Poteat, and Elizabeth Sewell — particularly where their work affirms the role of the person as an active, embodied participant in knowing and making sense of the world. In more recent years, my thinking has also found strong resonance with work in cognitive linguistics, especially where metaphor and language are understood to emerge from lived, relational experience rather than by abstract models that stand in for experience.

 
Alongside this philosophical grounding, my teaching and research-creation are shaped by extensive professional experience in the film and television art department, where I’ve worked as an art director and graphic designer, and in a variety of other on- and off-set roles.

 
At heart, my research-creation responds to the modern legacy of objectivism (treating meaning as something external or detachable) by seeking to recover a personal ground of knowing and being. Across my work, I return to the idea that meaning arises relationally or as a natural form of poetic attention that we embody — and that our need for structure, orientation, and connection is not abstract, but a deeply human response.

Education       

BA,Graphic Design, Sheridian College
MFA, StudioArts: Film Production, Concordia University   

Courses          

COMS485 – Moving Images III

COMS384 – Moving Images II

COMS284 – Moving Images I

COMS276 – Sound I

COMS569 – Graduate Diploma Moving Images

FMPR239 – Montage I

FMPR231 – Filmmaking I