Professional Bio

Dugan Rosalini, Filmmaker  

Dugan Rosalini has produced and directed more than 80 film projects in a wide variety of genres and motion picture formats for an equally-wide pallet of clients, purposes and venues, including prime-time National Public Television, high-end corporate image, public relations, non-profit fundraising, and family entertainment. 

He has worked in all film and most digital technical formats, including the largest and finest motion picture medium on Earth: 70mm/15-perf, giant-screen cinema, outfitted with pro­jec­tion equipment known by the brand names IMAX, OMNIMAX, D3D Cinema, D3D/Christie Laser Dome, and more.  He is one of little more than a dozen working filmmak­ers in the world possessing the experi­ence and skills required of writing, designing and directing for giant-screen motion picture production, and has been recog­nized as Screen magazine’s Director of the Year for his innovations in this format. 

Examples of his television experi­ence range from a hard-hitting, concept documentary about the nation’s need for a com­pre­hensive maritime policy and a 600-ship Navy (which helped its sponsor secure more than $20 billion in new contracts), to a corporate image commercial depicting a father’s love for his young daughter and dream for their family to own a farm of their own, to a feature-length re-creation of a 1935 expedition by amphibious airplane to explore the Amazon and re-tell a family’s six-generation legacy.  

He has directed Hollywood, Broadway, sports and other performance professionals, as well as a broad spectrum of ‘real people’—from astronauts, corporate CEOs, government officials, and high net-worth individ­u­als to assembly-line workers, taxi drivers, Olympics athletes, ship captains, ballerinas, farmers, ranchers and more.

Rosalini’s leadership approach and accountability rests on his Midwestern upbring­ing and values, while his film craft is optimistic, promotes what’s right in the world, and strives to capture the intrin­sic romance, poetry, and even the most simple narrative form of the subject at hand.

Characterization, Story, Meaning

Emotional Resonance serving Strategic Content 

Rosalini’s work honors the primacy of characterization, story, and mean­ing.  That simple.  Then, regardless of technology or technique—or a film’s topic, loca­tions, running time or budget—strategic content driven and made memorable by emotional resonance is what mat­ters most.

His ar­tis­tic orientation and aesthetic are founded on his earliest on-the-job train­ing—men­tored by one of American television’s found­ing pioneers—and college studies de­voted to Liberal Arts, Graphic and Architec­tural Design, and film under the disci­pline of Dramatic Art and associated closely with the University of Iowa’s graduate-level, cre­ative writ­ing pro­gram: its cele­brat­ed Writers’ Workshop. 

Rosalini’s films are generally contracted, work-for-hire projects, designed not only to meet specific and strategic goals, budgets and deadlines, but also to transmit the emo­tional con­text of story.  Audiences must genuinely care about the characters and content they’re watching (even, and especially, in a TV commercial) and his ability to tell a story in for­mats ranging from 30 seconds to two hours, across a wide range of topics, styles, and purposes—all with insight into the intrinsic drama of every subject and setting—distinguishes his work and the peer recognition it has received. 

Recognition

Includes three Chicago-Midwest Region Emmy awards, a fourth Emmy nomination, and six first-place awards from major international festivals, such as the Virgin Islands, Chicago, Houston, and American festivals; invitation to the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; special recognition from the International Wildlife Film Festival; inclusion in the American Library Association’s 'Fabulous Films for Young Adults'; Chicago Reader movie critic, Michael Grost’s ‘List of Outstanding American Feature Films’; and more than 30 industry-specific honors, including a CINE Golden Eagle, Focus recognition by Women In Film⎟Chicago, two Chicago Film Council Picasso awards, three Addy's, four U.S. Gold Cameras, and the highest film recognition awarded by the Public Relations Society of America, the Bronze Anvil.