Local Communities, Global Stories: Adam Sekuler Honored with Distinguished Teaching Award
- Reena Hamad
- 12 hours ago
- 3 min read
Reena Hamad Editor-in-Chief
This past March, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Production Adam Sekuler received the 2026 Distinguished Teaching Award for his demonstration of exceptional commitment to undergraduate education and innovative teaching. Sekuler had a unique path to the University of Michigan-Dearborn that moved through film production, curation and teaching, and yet a consistent interest in using cinema to better understand people and their stories.
Sekuler earned a Bachelor degree in Film, and Political Science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Upon graduation he worked in commercial filmmaking before joining Minnesota Film Arts where he curated year-round film programs for local theaters and helped produce the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Film Festival. After nearly a decade in Minnesota, Sekuler moved to Seattle and became program director at Northwest Film Forum.
Having always felt that he would want to teach, Sekuler returned to school to complete a master’s in Studio Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder and later started teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans.
While living in New Orleans, Sekuler describes having seen the city as warm and deeply expressive, with culture visible in every street, but also as a place shaped by difficult politics and complicated racial dynamics. Much of his time there, he says, had a significant influence on his perspectives of storytelling and human experience.
Having grown up just a few blocks from a video store in a diverse New Jersey suburb outside New York, Sekuler recalls spending his free time renting movies and watching them at home. International films in particular always stood out to him and going to a school where “over 100 flags were needed to represent the heritage of every student” led him to see film as a creative and accessible way to experience other cultures.
That early excitement later developed into a deeper passion in documentary work, where understanding other people and their narratives became imperative. At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Sekuler has brought those interests directly into the classroom. In Fall of 2023, Sekuler taught a course titled “Media Production in the Metropolitan Community,” having applied for a grant so students in the class could make films about the Arab American community in Dearborn.
The work for those students took on an added weight later that semester as they watched the experiences of Palestinians in Gaza and other countries in the Middle East unfold after October 7, 2023. His class had the newfound job of thinking about how to represent a local community affected by global events.
That course became a model for continuing the pursuit of that goal in a Fall 2025 offering titled “Documentary Film and Photography.” Through a project called “At The Edge Of Hope: Arab and Jewish American Film Initiative” students attempted to capture global politics from a local lens while also expanding their understanding of the history behind the people and places they were filming and interacting with.
Sekuler brought guest scholars from varied disciplines to give students more historical and ethical grounding in their projects. Hani Bawardi, Assistant Professor of History at the UM-Dearborn, spoke to the class about the history of the region from the Ottoman Empire to the present. Maureen Linker, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Curriculum and Experiential Learning, and Professor of Philosophy introduced the idea of “intellectual empathy to give students additional tools for a guiding principle” in engaging with the communities they were working with.
Sekuler’s efforts in this course reflected some of his central objectives as a professor: empathetic storytelling through documentary film and opportunities for direct contact with local communities impacted by global circumstances. For him, the aim was not only to teach students how to make films, but to put them in direct contact with local communities whose lives are shaped by circumstances beyond them and help their stories be told with care and accuracy.