SMAD racks up nine honors in 2025 BEA awards

Sixteen students representing all four Media Arts and Design concentrations earned recognition in the 2025 Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts competitions. The students won a total of eight awards while a SMAD faculty member added another win.

Students from the Digital Video & Cinema concentration led the way by winning six awards in the BEA’s Student Film & Video Competition. 

One of the films featured in December’s SMADFEST film screening placed second in the short narrative film category. That film, “Suitcase of Memories,” was written and directed by Edwin Domachowski and included Chloe Cameron as director of photography and Jake Nichols as editor. It was one of two films recognized in the BEA competition produced as part of the fall 2024 SMAD 405 class that Prof. Imelda O’Reilly taught.

The other film recognized from that fall 405 course was “Dirty Work” produced by Jadon Boeglin, Harrison Woodley, Soren Scott and Sawyer Julier-Albert. It won an award of excellence in the short narrative film category. Boeglin and Woodley also won a second award of excellence for their film “Heaven Spot,” which they produced during their time in the JMU in New York program that Prof. O’Reilly led last summer.

Three of Prof. O’Reilly’s scriptwriting students also won awards of excellence for their scripts:

• Daisy Fuller for “I Shall Not Want” in the short narrative film script category.
• Kaiden Greer for “Sinking” in the short narrative film script category.
• And Edwin Domachowski secured another honor in the narrative feature script category with his script for “Lucky Is She.”

Prof. O’Reilly secured her own award, winning the best of competition in the short narrative film category of the BEA’s Faculty Scriptwriting Competition for her script, “Rosemary.”

SMAD students also racked up awards in BEA’s Student Interactive Media & Emerging Technologies Competition.

Six students who covered the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last summer won third place in the multimedia storytelling category for their website that showcased 30 video and audio packages and written stories that they reported and published across both conventions.

The team included four Journalism Concentration students, one Interactive Design student and a student from DVC. McLaren Reed, a senior ID student, built the site and served as webmaster and chief photographer. Jordan Cooper, a junior in DVC, served a primary videographer. And journalism students Abby Allard, Alexa Bonilla, Eleanor Shaw and McKenna Schonbrun reported on convention events and developments, conducted interviews and collaborated to craft written, audio and video stories for Virginia Association of Broadcast member stations to download from the site and use in their broadcasts and on their websites.

In addition, Jamie Clingenpeel, a junior in the Creative Advertising concentration, won recognition with an award of excellence in the Interactive Media & Emerging Technologies’ social media category for her project “Meat the Climate Crisis.” She developed the project during her SMAD 201 class in fall 2024 with Prof. Elisabeth Kvernen.