By Blake Hollingsworth | Reporter
From Chicago movie theaters to HDTV innovation, Dr. Corey Carbonara’s career blends pushing technological boundaries and nurturing student talent.
His career resulted in his recent winning of the Presidential Proclamation from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Carbonara credits Baylor’s Film and Digital Media department for the award. He said it’s an acknowledgement of everything FDM has accomplished during his time at Baylor.
“I always wanted to let everybody know that I share this with all my colleagues and all my students,” Carbonara said. “FDM would be nothing without our students.”
Additionally, Carbonara believes the award highlights the importance of helping the next generation “move storytelling into a further dimension,” demonstrated by his emphasis on involving students in groundbreaking projects and research.
“We don’t want to do research without our students,” Carbonara said. “If our students can’t benefit at the undergraduate level as well as the graduate level, we don’t want to be a part of it.”
Growing up in ’60s Chicago, Carbonara said cinema experiences, such as viewing the epic “Lawrence of Arabia,” sparked his lifelong love for film. This early exposure, combined with the influence of his uncle, Vito Carbonara — a Hollywood character actor who appeared in series like “The Wild Wild West” — shaped his path toward a career behind the camera.
After studying film at the University of Iowa, Carbonara worked for Telemation, where he learned the process of creating 30-second commercials. According to Carbonara, this experience led to a higher degree of success at Columbia Pictures, where he produced 300-350 commercials per year, excelling in cinematography, lighting design and editing.
In 1983, Carbonara’s career pivoted when he joined Baylor University after being invited by his fellow grad student, Dr. Michael Korpi, a distinguished documentarian and then-chair of Baylor’s Radio, Television and Film division.
“I came down [to Baylor] in ‘82 and the department chair said, ‘You’re in charge,’” Korpi said. “We needed some more faculty, so I called Corey right away. … We picked cutting-edge media technologies as something we could focus on to make a name for Baylor so that it would help students who wanted internships in the media get in.
Together, Korpi and Carbonara elevated Baylor’s standards of cinematic storytelling through collaborative projects, particularly documentaries.
“Dr. Korpi and I were able to raise the bar of our department and introduce deeper production and storytelling capability,” Carbonara said. “I had more of the narrative experience at the time, but I also was very interested in documentary. So all this stuff began to influence and help us teach this, because we had a lot of practical experience.”
Furthermore, Carbonara’s tenure at Baylor saw groundbreaking projects in the field of high-definition television. After a stint as product manager at Sony in the ’80s where he worked on influential pieces like “Arrival” — a project featuring a young Robert Downey Jr. that pioneered high-definition filming techniques — Carbonara said he leveraged his industry connections to make Baylor the first university to offer an HDTV curriculum in 1989.
He went on to discuss his media and society class, explaining that he believes that the freedom the university gives its professors and students to speak openly about religion makes Baylor unique.
“[Baylor’s environment] allows students to express what their position is and where they feel they’re at in regards to the ethical aspects of film,” Carbonara said. “I love the fact that we can create an environment where we’re looking at [the subject] from more than one dimension, including how [it’s] related to a person’s faith, so I embrace that. Our students have embraced that. There’s no judgments, and it’s an opportunity for people to really express how they feel.”
