bio
I was born in 1972 in London, UK, to American parents. We moved to Toronto, Canada, when I was almost two. I was educated at Bialik Hebrew Day School, The Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, and Northern Secondary School, the high school from which I graduated in 1990.
I enrolled at McGill University in Montreal in the fall of that year where I majored in English literature. While studying at McGill I also wrote leftish news and features articles for the venerable McGill Daily and watched movies at various now-defunct art and revival house theaters with picture palace names like Rialto and Paris, where the seats were always broken, the prints were always scratchy, and the sound was always terrible. I graduated with a B.A. in 1994 on the day of O.J. Simpson's low-speed chase.
After holding down a series of strange and dull jobs in New York City and Toronto, I began graduate school in the film studies program of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. I earned an M.A. in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2005. My dissertation is called Characterization in American Independent Cinema and is both a theory of characterization as a form of social cognition, and a consideration of how character functions as a central appeal of films in the contemporary indie film movement. My committee included Michele Hilmes, Vance Kepley, Jr., Ben Singer, and my advisor, David Bordwell.
I have lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 2002 with my wife, Elana Levine, a media scholar and fellow Madison alum. Our son, Leo Elliott Levine Newman, was born in 2004.