VISUAL ARTS

Gretchen has bigger problems than abysmal fashion sense: She's 17, painfully awkward and stuck in the most unforgiving place on earth - high school. When her obsession with school bad boy Ricky gets out of hand, her mother sends her to an emotional treatment center to recover. She has to travel elsewhere, however, to truly begin to understand why she fixates on the wrong kind of guy. Steve Collins wrote and directed the feature film Gretchen, which won Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival and currently screens on the Sundance Channel. He studied film at Wesleyan University and received an MFA in film production from the University of Texas-Austin. While in graduate school, he directed the short film Lonelyland, which was also purchased by the Sundance Channel. Collins has taught filmmaking at UT Austin, a therapeutic boarding school, and Wesleyan University, where he presently teaches screenwriting and film production. His second feature, You Hurt my Feelings, opens theatrically in May of this year.