Ros Smith was Managing Director of Scottish media company Fierce Films, based in Edinburgh, UK. As an early champion of digital media, Fierce Films won a ‘Best New Business’ award in 1998. In addition she co-founded and developed The Film School Scotland, which attracted over 2000 students and cemented educational ties with Ireland and Denmark.

 

Concentrating on documentary/drama, broadcast credits include the BBC and Yorkshire TV. Working with clients such as The Commonwealth Heads of Government and Edinburgh Grand Opera enabled her work to be distributed as far afield as Greece and New Zealand. As Scottish Correspondent for Sky News Medical Channel, assignments took her all over Britain.

 

After arriving in Charleston in 2003, she worked on many local projects, some of which were screened at The Gibbes Museum and the CFADA Art Walk. Published work includes book critiques for The City Paper and Post & Courier newspapers and a review for the UFVA quarterly journal. Her most recent work, Priscilla’s Legacy, is a documentary about a slave girl who worked for 50 years on a South Carolina Plantation. The film won Best Regional Short at The Charleston Film Festival in 2014, and has been jury selected by the Buffalo Film Festival for screening in April.  

 

Having taught all aspects of digital filmmaking at The Art Institute of Charleston for over 6 years, Ros joined the Fredonia Communication Department in September 2014. Her poetic documentary, Views from Within, recently won Chautauqua Tourist Board’s I Love Chautauqua contest.  She is currently producing a  documentary feature, Sleepwalkers. How we are nurturing a nation on speed, that investigates ADHD and amphetamine use.