A new Program Director system has been put in place with the Icelandic Film School and amazing people have joined the team!

This summer has involved a lot of restructuring with the teaching system at the Icelandic Film School, the object being to focus on teaching within the specialized subjects and improve quality of service. Instead of the department division with one head of a department that has been used for the last decade, we have adapted a program direction system where one Program Director is in charge of each specialized program within a department. So in each department there will be 2-3 Program Directors that have the mission of coordinating courses, have oversight of employment of teachers and instructors and are to ensure that each student will receive all they need for the graduation criteria within each subject.

Heading the Program Directors will be a Studies Director that will be responsible for the making of timetables, coordinating the Program Directors, curriculums and the inner web. The model for this system can be found in many of the more prestigious film schools in Europe. This will not affect our tradition of working with a wide variety of teachers in all the programs for the students benefit.

We have been working on hiring Program Directors for the last few weeks and that process should be completed at the beginning of next week. We have already hired people for most of the positions and are very fortunate to have been able to get gifted and experienced people aboard. Here is a list of our Program Directors so far:

Hilmar Oddsson, our former principal, Director of “Directing”
Hlín Jóhannesdóttir, our former division head of Directing/Producing from 2014-2016, Director of “Producing”
Kjartan Kjartansson, Director of “Sound”
Jakob Halldórsson, Director of “Editing”
Kristján U. Kristjánsson, Director of “Visual effects VFX”
Ottó Geir Borg, Director of “Script category”
Gunnar B. Gunnarsson, Director of “Full length scripts”
Þórey Sigþórsdóttir, Director of “Acting and voicing”

All these people are at the forefront of their subjects and have enormous experience in teaching, both within the Film School and elsewhere and we are very excited to have them on the team. After the weekend we will announce 3 more Program Directors, as well as our new principal.

It is our firm belief that this new system will improve both the service to students as well as the overall quality of the school experience.