From Hollywood to the Halls of SOC: Professor Caty Borum Chattoo

How many of your professors have an IMDB profile? While the School of Communication is still getting back to me on the total number, check out Caty Borum Chattoo’s star quality: she is this week’s Campus Celebrity!

Her credentials run a red-carpet length list of expertise in film, production and education entertainment. From producing documentaries like “WalMart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “The Sierra Chronicles” to increasing social issue awareness with Hollywood legend Norman Lear, Professor Caty Borum Chattoo, from the School of Communication, knows the Hollywood system like the back of her hand. 

Professor Borum Chattoo is an East Coast native by way of LA. Her students range from freshmen to grad students, providing a wide array of experiences and communication styles for her to learn from. So how does she connect to all her students? “I think I do a lot of storytelling,” she said. “We are engaged by stories and the more that you can package up instructional information in stories, I think you may remember it more and learn how to apply it.” With an extensive resume in entertainment philanthropy and consulting positions on the East Coast, you can be sure she has a lot of stories to share.  While she understands the academic value of learning through a textbook, as a communications professor, Professor Borum Chattoo thinks her real world experiences, and the experiences of her students, provide a better description of life outside the classroom. Though she may no longer get personally star struck, her students love to hear the stories from Hollywood. By integrating true stories, events and digital learning into the classroom, Professor Borum Chattoo hopes she can inspire her students to discover new possibilities. 

When you take a class with Professor Borum Chattoo, expect a lot of fun discussion and engagement. However, she does get help from one major source to teach her classes, citing a popular website as her assistant: “YouTube is my TA.”

Here’s our Q&A with Professor Borum Chattoo:

HCAU: As a magazine for collegiettes™, can you tell us about your college years, where you went, what you majored in?

CBC: I’ve gone to a lot of school. I was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, and I have an undergraduate degree in communication studies. And then I went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate school and I have a master’s degree in communications. There, it’s a very academic approach to understanding how media affects consumer behavior by the ways we make decisions about health, for example, the ways we make decisions about voting decisions, our ideologies. So it’s basically a broad look at media effects. And then later on, a million years later, I was in the MFA program at USC for film production, because I was interested in documentary production. I’m a year short of finishing the MFA because I was being hired as a producer, which is incredibly ironic.  When I got to college, I decided that I wanted to reinvent myself because I knew that I was smart and I hadn’t applied myself. So I became a straight-A student in college, not a single B. One of my proudest achievements was that I finished first in my class. You can imagine that I did not have much going on.
 

HCAU: Any outstanding experiences?

CBC: The summer after my sophomore year — this is going to sound so crazy –I was a mover. That was the best-paying job in my community and I thought it would be gender discrimination if I didn’t get hired as a mover. I basically had the opportunity to work with a group of people that were completely different from my college experience. These are professional movers, and I had this really interesting glimpse into basically, when I would go into houses to start packing up people’s houses, people would talk to me one way when they thought I was “one of the workers” and then if they would ask a question, I would say “I’m in college and I’m studying this and that.” Suddenly the treatment of me was so different. As a 19-year-old, you just see the world based on how you are brought up. I’m not sure if it was that experience, but I have this real interest in social justice issues. It ended up being a very important experience for me. Also in college, I saw Michael Moore’s first documentary in a sociology class called “Roger and Me.” I had never seen something like that. I didn’t even really understand it was called a documentary. That makes me sound so crazy, but that was before we had the web and all this cultural understanding and all these abilities to find worlds outside of ourselves. I just thought it was such a compelling art form. It was the seed I wanted to use to  hopefully use whatever talents or abilities in communication to work on social issues.

HCAU: So you’ve had some really amazing experiences working in Hollywood and you’ve shared them in class but what brought you to DC?

CBC: The answer is really uninteresting. I had worked in Hollywood for about ten years in a really interesting, lovely part of the business which is broadly defined as entertainment philanthropy. Working to promote social issues through entertainment, so anything from HIV awareness working with Kaiser Family Foundation to working with the Lear Center which is engaged with producers and writers to encourage social issues in entertainment to working with Norman Lear  to encourage young people to get involved in democracy  and to vote using the tools of entertainment. Through all that, you learn how the entertainment business works. I had been doing that for about ten years and then my husband and I had a baby. Our family is on the East Coast. We thought maybe we should try to be “East Coasters” again for a while. 

HCAU: Are you enjoying the east coast?

CBC: I have to say, I am enjoying the East Coast. I’m originally from the East Coast, so it’s not like I’m a foreigner. I loved California so much. When I moved to California, I thought that I found myself in a lot of ways. Because it was a whole community of wildly creative people, some of whom were doing really strange jobs. The place is based on creating stories out of thin air. How magical is that? I think in my 20s I sort of needed a little of creativity in that way, not that there wasn’t any of that on this coast. I like that I have an East Coast background and that I’m back doing serious social issue kind of work that combines with entertainment. It’s a really nice complementary set of experiences for me. 

Rapid Fire Favorites:

Favorite Director: Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”)

Favorite Current TV Show: Friday Night Lights

Favorite Movie: Roots, Roger & Me

Most Memorable Project: “WalMart: The High Price of Low Cost,” “Sierra Club Chronicles”

Favorite Spot in DC: Crossing over the Key Bridge in the morning when the sun is coming up.