Awards Panel

Kenneth Finkel

Executive Director, Arts & Culture Services, WHYY

Kenneth Finkel has served as WHYY’s Executive Director of Arts & Culture Services since February 2000. He was an executive producer of the four-part Philadelphia Performs series and is currently leading WHYY’s development of an Arts & Culture Service plan.

Finkel entered the field of Philadelphia arts and culture as curator of prints and photographs at the nation’s oldest cultural institution, the Library Company of Philadelphia, a position he held from 1977 to 1994. Major projects during that time included books, catalogues and exhibitions on 19th-century photography, book illustration and the history of architecture. From 1994-99, he was a program officer at the William Penn Foundation, focusing on arts and culture.

Finkel’s latest book, with Kathleen Foster, entitled Captain Watson’s Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1771-1818 (University of PA Press, 1997), was the recipient of an Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award. Another book to which he contributed, on the railroad photography of William H. Rau, is due out later this year. Finkel was a regular contributor of articles on history and cultural policy to the Inquirer’s Commentary Page and was guest curator of two exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the 150th anniversary of photography and Eastern State Penitentiary). He was also editor of the Philadelphia Almanac and Citizens’ Manual for 1994 and 1995.

A member of the boards of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, Finkel is a lifelong Philadelphian who was educated at Temple University.

Kelly M. DeVine

Supervisor of Acquisitions, IFC

Kelly M. DeVine hails from New Orleans and is currently a resident of Long Island, NY. She received a BA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, creating her own amalgam of contemporary English literature and film studies as part of the university’s Interdisciplinary Studies program. She also holds a master’s degree in Sociology. She has worked for Bravo Networks in the IFC Films division since July of 1999.

Peter Leokum

Deputy Director, Greater Philadelphia Film Office

Peter Leokum joined the Greater Philadelphia Film Office as deputy director in 1992, after the successful spin-off of the Film Office to a regional agency. In addition to serving as backup to the executive director, he is responsible for ensuring that film, video and commercial production runs as smoothly as possible. To this end, he serves as liaison with city agencies to meet production needs, obtains production permits, assists production staff in securing locations for shoots and ensures that productions run as smoothly as possible so that the region’s reputation is an incentive for repeat and new production.

Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Leokum graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with a BA in drama. He came to the Greater Philadelphia Film Office with over 20 years in the motion picture industry. Working in the distribution side of the business, his affiliations included such companies as Warner Brothers, United Artists, Avco Embassy and Orion. Leokum served as branch manager for nine years in Philadelphia, distributing motion pictures to all theaters in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.

John Columbus

Executive Director, Black Maria Film & Video Festival

John Columbus received his BFA degree Cum Laude with a major in graphic design at Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in 1969. While at Hartford, Columbus experimented in filmmaking and upon graduation joined the UP Independent Filmmakers Cooperative in New York and worked with underground legend Jack Smith.

Columbus’s first short film, Jersey Three— made at UP — was exhibited at the Ann Arbor and Chicago Film Festivals. After receiving an MFA in film directing from Columbia University, he became the founding vice president of the Atlantic Film Society and started an annual spring film festival while also teaching film at Stockton State College. In 1980 Columbus started the nationally recognized film festival named after Thomas Edison’s 1893 film studio "The Black Maria."

In 1982 Columbus joined the film faculty at the University of the Arts, conceived and collaborated on the documentary film Barnegat which was broadcast on WNET 13, and completed another short documentary Olive’s Farm (1988) now in the permanent collection of the Center for Southern Folklore.

Columbus has been guest curator for the Flaherty Film Seminar; juror for the National Endowment for the Arts; guest critic-mentor at Rhode Island School of Design; film programmer and trustee of Robert Flaherty Film Seminars; and a member of the Motion Picture Centennial Committee of the Edison National Historic Site.

He is currently adjunct associate professor of film in the media arts department at the University of the Arts.