Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Alumni in the Spotlight

Greg Mottola was a studio arts major at Carnegie Mellon University and began making his first 16mm films through Pittsburgh Filmmakers. He went on to attend Columbia University’s graduate film school. Greg wrote and directed The Daytrippers, which was an official selection in Critics’ Week at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, won an award at the Toronto Film Festival, received both the Grand Prize and the Audience Prize at the Deauville International Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance International Film Festival. Greg has also worked as an actor in the Woody Allen films Celebrity and Hollywood Ending. He and producer Nancy Tenenbaum (sex, lies and videotape) collaborated to make Greg’s Adventureland, a coming-of-age comedy set on Long Island in 1983. He is best known as the director of the hit comedy Superbad.

“Attending campus movie screenings as a freshman, I became electrified by a kind of cinema that was very different than what I’d seen in my youth. I am forever grateful for the years I spent at Pittsburgh Filmmakers… Pittsburgh Filmmakers impressed upon me the possibility of film as both a tool for personal expression and social consciousness. After graduating I went on to graduate school at Columbia University – which was an excellent program – but in many ways it is my time at Pittsburgh Filmmakers that I think of whenever I’m attempting to push the boundaries of my imagination.”