sue-lynn zan

In 1998, I made a short film on super 8 called “Ying-Ying Said” which featured Fon-Lin Nyeu, Rain Noe, Huy Dao, Jeff Ng, Benjamin Lai, and Larry (Lee, family name to verify) as actors, and Patricia Yoon as Ying-Ying’s voiceover. I completed the editing in Hans Dudelheim’s 16mm Steenbeck class at the New School in NYC. Hans invited me to present it at the 1999 New School Festival (kindly attended by Cornell co-alum Huy Dao and Arun Chaudhary, who later became one of our NYU film professors and the official White House Videographer for Barack Obama).

Professor Dudelheim told me I’d received honorable mention for the film, and later added this to my recommendation for NYU’s MFA program. Hans was a good friend whose personal memoir about being a half-Jew in Nazi Germany I helped edit in 1998 or 1999. In 1999, he accompanied me to B&H Photo to buy a digital camera before I travelled to China, where he hoped I would seek documentary material, as he had been an Emmy-winning documentarist.

I hope to upload an image here later, or perhaps the film itself.

In 2003, at NYU, for my second-year documentary project, I directed and presented a short film about my parents, with my mom in the central role, called “Housewife.” Many people liked it because I had access to real subjects, of course, who presented themselves in an open and honest way. The film was presented to the usual huge crowd of hundreds at the Cantor Center as well as the usual highly distinguished faculty in our MFA screening room for evaluation. I still have the original source footage and am hoping to extend and transform the project.

Apologies. It’s a bit politically-incorrect, but I was fifteen.

I have been training Olivia Lee on poetry since autumn 2025, and she just informed me that she won three Gold awards for all three submitted poems at the Regional level for Scholastic 2026. (Last year, one of her Regional Golds went on to win National Silver in the short story category!) Congratulations to Olivia and her family.

I am on a formal hiatus from tutoring in favor of working on a film project; Olivia returned to me to work on creative writing in the fall. If other previous serious writing-track students need help, they should feel free to contact me.

When I was in Athens in 2021, I had these profound feelings of both elation and sadness that I couldn’t place. I remember calling my sister on skype and trying to convey what I was feeling while sitting on this balcony https://www.instagram.com/p/DLFOSoounXD/ and staring at the most magnificent dusk light I’ve ever seen… it was all deep orange and golds emanating from behind black silhouettes of mountains. I told her it was as if the most important memories of my childhood had become so distant from me that they seemed to be slipping from my sense of self. But something about that was also beatific: it proved that those memories, those feelings were real.

I wrote a poem to try to explain it better. I revised the poem a couple of times over a couple of years, and each time, it felt to me as if that experience from 2021 had just happened. https://www.instagram.com/p/CtAZdkPt10k/

The poem still doesn’t quite express what I was feeling, to be honest. I have wondered many times where it came from. I thought about genocides of the past, age-old tragedies I might have been channelling while in Greece. I thought about Covid. I thought about the individual heartbreak of acquaintances. I asked friends of mine if they’d been depressed at that time, and they denied it.

Today I found out on the internet that my friend Kate Garrison passed away that year, in 2021. I wrote about her in my women geniuses blog. She was a truly wonderful person. We emailed very frequently while teaching together in my final year at the School of Visual Arts. She was funny, witty, and deeply humanitarian, as she would talk to me about her job training kids with learning disabilities to write essays. It always seemed fascinating and mystical to me.

Kate had gone to Amherst and UC Berkeley, two schools I always deeply admired, to study literature. She had a twin sister who had gone to Oxford and sometimes made appearances on the BBC, whom she mentioned from time to time. Kate was one of five people who gave me a recommendation for Columbia in 2017. I wish I had been able to say goodbye.

This was shocking news. More information at this link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19zdp7Xiuj

Kate, you belong in heaven, so I am sure you are at peace up there.

2:53am: As I found this tweet, I thought I heard Kate’s voice saying, “I love you.” https://x.com/battening/status/1351180837568581640

I just found out that my writing student Olivia Lee won a National Level Silver at Scholastic for “Before the Kanto Massacre.”

https://medals.artandwriting.org

Great news. Her previous awards are listed here: https://sue-lynnzan.space/my-student-olivia-lee-at-the-pta-regions/

Here’s one of the trailers I made for my NYU thesis film, “Moon Lady,” which was given a top screening spot at Slamdance 2009 (Slamdance discovered Christopher Nolan), while winning two awards at other festivals.