Andrew Syder, Ph.D.

Andrew Syder was born and raised in England, where he was weaned on a diet of bland British food and spicy American movies. He studied film and literature at Warwick University before heading across the pond to the University of Southern California, where he earned a doctorate in Cinematic Arts and worked as a freelance filmmaker.

At USC, Andrew was a key architect of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, founded by George Lucas to explore literacy in a culture increasingly shaped by moving images, games, and interactive media. That experience sparked an enduring enthusiasm for building educational programs. He went on to lead a partnership with Academy Award-winning visual effects studio Digital Domain, helping develop its vocational training school while also launching FSU’s animation program, and he currently serves as the Senior Associate Dean for the College of Motion Picture Arts.

Andrew is a generalist by nature, with one foot in scholarship and the other in filmmaking. His scholarship has appeared in journals, books, Blu-ray releases, podcasts, and Letterboxd; he is currently writing a book about psychedelic visual culture in the 1960s, tracing the history of intersections between visual technologies and human perception. His creative work has spanned writing, directing, cinematography, editing, visual effects, documentary, script consultation, graphic design, and web design. He especially loves the peculiar license filmmaking gives you to enter worlds you might otherwise never encounter. How else might he have ended up in a remote workshop in the Bavarian mountains with a German artisan known as “The Creator,” whose chosen medium happened to be animatronic sex dolls?

In the classroom, Andrew emphasizes curiosity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, designing courses that challenge students across a range of experience levels. His teaching has been recognized with FSU’s prestigious Graduate Teaching Award.

Underneath it all, Andrew remains an insatiable cinephile. He has reluctantly accepted that he won’t be able to watch every movie before shuffling off this mortal coil, but he intends to put up a respectable fight.