Dr. T. CHINNARAJ JOSEPH JAIKUMAR
Founder Director
The founding of the Madurai Media and Film Studies Academy (MMFSA) is an outcome of more than ten years of my dreaming and experimenting.
For long, media and communication studies remained as the privilege of the metropolitan cities like Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai. The easy excuse was the physical proximity of academic institutions to film and advertisement industries. Though considerable talent for the film/media industry came from the rural hinterland and small towns, certain defensive mindset kept many academic institutions of second-tier cities like Madurai, not to risk with anything like film or media studies. However, American College broke this tradition by starting B.Sc. Visual Communication in 2007 under autonomy curriculum when I was its Principal and Secretary. My lifelong interest in film and media studies coupled with my privileged academic position helped me to watch from very close quarters in the next three or four years, how the curriculum, pedagogy and academy-industry interface of media education worked in colleges.