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Jes Therkelsen and the Jagaran Media Center (JMC)
Jes Therkelsen is currently a third-year MFA candidate in film and media arts at American University's School of Communication. As a 2008 Peace Fellow with Washington DC's Advocacy Project, Therkelsen will be working with the Jagaran Media Center for three months this summer.
Among the many ambitious projects he hopes to undertake, Therkelsen's main task will be to use his media experience to help Dalit activists and journalists to produce media in many forms to help raise local, national and international awareness of caste discrimination within Nepal.
After graduating from Amherst College in May 2002 with a degree in geology, Therkelsen lived for a year in Athens, Greece as a teacher through the Hellenic-American Education Fellowship. Finding himself in a unique position to experience firsthand the foreign response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Therkelsen began to write about, sketch and photograph his surroundings. After returning to the states to work as a state geologist, he assembled this work into a photodocumentary, which caught the attention of Rider University, who awarded him a grant to author another film.
Therkelsen's second film, “The Best Part of Everything” was an official selection at San Francisco's Documentary Festival and a DC Peer Award winner for Best Student Production. After completing “The Best Part of Everything”, Therkelsen quit his job and moved to Washington, DC to pursue an MFA in documentary filmmaking at American University.
Therkelsen's work often tackles social issues seen through the lens of personal stories. "To Steal A Bicycle" was a 2006 honorary mention for Best Documentary at Visions Festival in Washington, DC and a traveling short in the 2007 Bicycle Film Festival. "Missed Connections" won 'Best of DC' in the 2006 International Documentary Challenge and later was an official selection in 2007 DC Shorts Film Festival.
Therkelsen also teaches Film and Digital Media at American University's School of Communication as an Adjunct Faculty. He is the founder of Wise Guise Productions, a Washington DC-based documentary production company.
Dalit represent almost 22 percent of the Nepali population. For centuries they have endured all forms of discrimination. The state denied them from owning land, attending educational institutions or places of worship, and, at times, from even entering the houses of upper caste Hindus. In 1963, Nepal revoked all laws that made institutionalized discrimination of Dalits legal. But even now, those laws have done little to improve the plight of Dalit communities.
Born and raised in suburbia, New Jersey, Jes has lived in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Greece, and Germany. Besides filmmaking, he enjoys composing and playing music and has scored many of his films. His other interests include arduous outdoor adventures, getting lost, eating things he can't spell, and recognizing the night sky. He currently lives in a leafy neighborhood in Washington, DC with a bamboo stalk and a cactus and can be seen riding his bicycle a lot.
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