Film Matters Joins F&MAD

The University of Utah Department of Film & Media Arts is the proud new base of operations for Film Matters, the esteemed film journal celebrating the work of undergraduate film scholars. Effective August 2025, the journal is a product of the department, following the magazine’s co-founder and co-Editor-in-Chief, Tim Palmer, joining the department as Professor and Department Chair.

“Thanks to the pioneering work of Liza Palmer, co-founder and co-Editor-in-Chief of Film Matters, the Department of Film & Media Arts is delighted to announce our new partnership,” said Palmer.  “[Students] are now hard at work as the new editorial board of the Film Matters journal.”

Film Matters is published three times per year and includes online articles as well as a print magazine published by Intellect Press, UK. The magazine is for undergraduate students, by undergraduate students, and includes a peer review process. Students participating in the course Film 3920: Producing the Undergraduate Film Magazine serve as the magazine’s editorial board, under the supervision of Co-Editors-in-Chief Liza Palmer and Tim Palmer.

“This represents an enormous fresh-start opportunity and we are liaising with Intellect right away to consider ways the journal, and everyone connected to it, can benefit from the new berth, at an ambitious world-class university, in a major global hub of film and media culture,” Film Matters published in a recent statement.

U Film & Media Arts welcomes Film Matters to the department! In the meantime, Palmer says, students are “gaining real-world experience in film and media publishing — just part of the new continuum of applied learning going on in the department!”